One of the
city’s newer venues is the HMV Empire on Hertford Street which last night welcomed
the city’s Mayor for the first time (as well as your reviewer) to enjoy a
performance of 'Her Day', a new opera setting Vanessa Oakes’ libretto to music by
Sayan Kent. 'Her Day' had premiered the previous night, on International Women’s
Day – highly appropriate for an opera written by women, about women, and
featuring an all-female cast.
The setting is the
Her Day Women’s Day Centre in Coventry where, in the first act (“All The Women”), we are introduced to three of the four principal characters. Tahmina (Claire
Wild) is an Asylum Seeker who came to Coventry from Iran with her husband; she
has made and brought a Persian love cake which is her daughter’s favourite. Grace
(Grace Nyandoro) is genenerous to a fault but elderly and confused. Her
personal solution to most of life’s ills is a good cup of coffee with lots of
sugar. The group’s facilitator is Kathy (Nina Bennet) whose mother we learn,
through listening in to her end of a phone conversation, is living with
Alzheimer’s.
We get to know
these three women through, what seem at first like mundane interactions,
although we soon come to understand that nothing in 'Her Day' is wasted or
without meaning, sung beautifully and accompanied by an all-female quintet
playing Kent’s quirky, syncopated score in 6/8 time. The women all set about
making keepsakes using coloured beads. Quickly we come to identify with them
and appreciate the importance of 'Her Day' both as their safe space away from
their problems in the wider world and as the strong connection between them.
Act 2, (“Social
Animals”), begins suddenly – shockingly even – as Meesha (Kelly Glyptis) bursts
in to the centre, produces a large loudspeaker and encourages everyone to get
up and dance as the device belts out strident major sevenths in four-time.
Tahmina and Grace look on in amazement as the chorus attempt to follow Meesha’s
lead. Kathy returns from making a round of coffees to see what has happened and
confronts Meesha.
It turns out
that Meesha has come a week early to start her “dancercise” class, a revelation
which forces Kathy to announce that this week is the last at Her Day Centre. She has
failed to secure a grant to carry on the work of the centre and the keepsakes are
“to remind us of each other”. As Grace and Tahmina try to digest the
implications of this terrible news, Kathy squares up to Meesha.
This is perhaps
the stand-out scene of the whole piece as the superficially brash Meesha tries
to persuade Kathy that things might not be so bad and that change might do the
women good. Kathy is incensed by what she sees as platitudes and becomes
increasingly hostile towards Meesha who, triggered, suddenly blurts out her own
tragic backstory.
In Act 3, (“Together And Apart”), the women – all now friends – try to come to terms with
the impending change, revisiting memories of the group’s happier days and
looking for hope in the future. It would be spoiling it to reveal how
everything ends but when the end did come it felt rather abrupt and I couldn’t
help wishing that a bit more of the story had been told. The enthusiastic
applause at the end was thoroughly deserved.
This is quite a
short opera with a running time of about 70 minutes but it has everything an
opera should have – a strong libretto, a score which would stand as music in
its own right (I would definitely buy the CD if there were one), believable
characters and, of course, the chorus. In this case the Community Chorus is
made up of twelve local women, all of whom joined the project for different
reasons and with different experiences; their performance greatly enhanced the
whole work.
One minor
quibble might be the acoustics in the venue which are (for understandable
reasons) geared to unidirectional sound from the stage rather than to an
audience surrounding the performers on one level. Whilst this created a really
intimate atmosphere it did mean some of the lyrics became difficult to hear
when the singer was facing a different section of the audience.
Her Day deals
with a number of important issues – support for asylum seekers, domestic
violence, the care of elderly people with dementia, the unpaid and often
unappreciated role of women as carers. It also highlights the precarious nature
of support services as they try to function between one grant and the next,
facing oblivion if the next grant doesn’t come. It also celebrates the
resourcefulness of women as they cope with all of these things.
'Her Day' deserves an audience – and not just a female one. I’d recommend it to anyone
who wants to experience both excellent new art and an insight into the real
struggles faced on a daily basis by real women.
Reviewer - Ian Simpson
on - 9/3/22
It was a great gig
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