Following the immense success of her irreverent musical romp ‘Pride & Prejudice* (*sort of)’, Isobel McArthur is back with a much-anticipated follow up.
And it’s… a sort of lightweight ‘90s style romcom that feels crushingly underwhelming at first but eventually becomes so loopy that it kind of ends up transcending its pedestrian beginnings. Plus: opera. Lots of opera.
Aaron (Ali Watt) is a deeply confused young man starting his first day at a branch of a depressing corporate hotel chain, in a building that was once a magnificent opera house. His fellow staff are a bunch of characters. The hotel guests are a bunch of characters. Rudeness, affairs, broken appliances, a taciturn foreign member of staff who everyone underestimates… you get the picture.
It sort of drifts by in a sketch shows-like haze, but slowly a main plot begins to emerge. Early on, Aaron encounters Amy (Karen Fishwick), an apparent fellow member of staff who he mistakes for a ghost, in part because she’s confusingly bellowing opera out at the top of her lungs, singing along to the Walkman she insists on using as a listening device.
Long story short, the two fall for each other after Amy leaves her Walkman and some tapes for him to find. But the two seem incapable of physically meeting each other, despite apparently both being visible to the guests. Is something supernatural going on here?
There is, I’m going to be honest, some extremely shoddy structuring in ‘The Grand Old Opera House’, that makes a bit of a mockery out of the above question. But while the whole thing frankly feels like it could have done with another draft or two, the fever dream like last half-hour of Gareth Nicholls’s production is undeniably pretty bloody good, as Aaron and Amy embark upon a last, desperate attempt to try and meet each other, trying desperately to pass a message on to each other, while being chased by an unruly tide of guests. Oh, and it’s all sung through.
The end result is a weird mix of dizzying ambition and undeniable half-arsedness. Dated autopilot humour and clunky plotting is offset by that dazzling last setpiece and the cleverness of the plot’s frequent references to Bartok’s gothic opera ‘Bluebeard’s Castle’. And the singing is both a nice flourish and simply makes the whole show seem a lot weirder as it wears on. But it feels bitty and uneven where it should have all been sysnthesised together into one brilliant farce. Instead ‘The Grand Old Opera Hotel’ shows us flashes of McArthur’s talent, her wit an inventiveness and gift for mixing up genres – but also flashes of how she might waste it.