Bach: St John Passion (Concert Review - The Times, 2002)

Deborah Warner's work in the lyric theatre divides audiences like that of no other director. She has provoked the most vicious booing Glyndebourne has ever known (Don Giovanni, 1994) and mocking laughter at the climax of her modern-dress Fidelio in the same theatre last year. And there are those who admire everything she does — I plead guilty. I suspect that the few people who scuttled from the Coliseum after the revival of her staging of the St John Passion on Friday had had a horrible evening; most stayed to cheer. But is this the sort of show you should cheer? I don’t know the answer to that. All I can say is that the power of the staging transcends the element of “religious experience” while at the same time obviously embracing it. The most shattered, red-eyed person I saw afterwards was an atheist and Jewish. Enacting this version of the Passion does tend to expose a latent anti-Semitism in the Christian faith, and the fact that my Jewish friend had taken this in her stride confirmed that what Warner has achieved through the medium of Bach is bigger than all of us, than our faith, prejudices or preconceptions. The sense of community so powerfully evoked is at the centre of the evening’s success: the chorus in everyday clothes, every one of them an individual, the auditorium lighting that makes the audience as one with them, the “community chorus” singing the chorales from the stage boxes. It’s a most human, everyday kind of ritual. What action there is remains nearabstract (Christ returns to the stage after the Crucifixion). Yet the whole performance breathes searing drama, in the confrontation between Paul Whelan’s calmly grave Jesus and David Kempster’s eminently reasonable Pilate, in the comforting of Peter (Leslie John Flanagan) after his triple denial, in the brilliantly contrived integration of the solo singers into what action there is: Catherine Wyn-Rogers and Barry Banks return, James Rutherford (singing most expressively) and Gillian Keith are new. Perhaps more strongly stated than when the staging was new two years ago is the journey that the Evangelist has to make. Mark Padmore, singing most beautifully throughout, starts out as a detached commentator and narrator, but his personal status as the disciple whom Jesus loved gradually takes over, and by the end he is near complete breakdown. Personal grief has its place in communal ritual, and the drawing together of both in Warner’s final coup, which I will still not describe, sets the seal on the evening. This Passion, propulsively conducted by Stephen Layton with a mixed modern/period band, is to be televised on Good Friday.

Rodney Miles