Tale of revenge when practical joke backfires

A GROUP which aims to make opera more digestible is returning to the Kenton Theatre next month.

The Merry Opera Company is performing Die Fledermaus, Johann Strauss II’s 1874 Viennese operetta, on Friday, February 7.

Set around that time and place, the comedy is full of ballroom dancing, mistaken identities, mischievous characters and recognisable music.

Founder, Matthew Quirk, who also plays Frank in the production, explains: “Die Fledermaus is the story of a party set in Vienna.

“A couple of years before the opera, one of the characters, Eisenstein, had played a practical joke on one of the other characters, Falke. They had gone to a fancy-dress ball together and Falke had gone dressed as a bat, with wings and a great long nose and got terribly drunk and had been wheeled out into the city centre by his friend Eisenstein, left without his trousers to rollick around the middle of Vienna and had become the laughing stock of society.

“This opera is the bat’s revenge, it’s Falke’s revenge. He knows that Eisenstein is a bit of a lad, he invites him to a party and a lot of people turn up in fancy dress including Eisenstein’s maid and wife, and Eisenstein is dazzled by both of them. And so Eisenstein is about to be carted off to jail because he’s been rude to some bureaucrat and the last scene is in the prison, where everyone suddenly sees that they have all been misbehaving, but in a gentle way.

“I mean, no one has slept with anyone else or anything like that, it’s just been talked about and blurted about but nothing has happened and they all realise that actually these sorts of things spice up their lives.

“So it’s a happy, it is actually very happy, with the most gorgeous tunes, wonderful waltzes, it’s a classic Strauss thing.”

Matthew says the company’s mission is to make opera understandable, with singers making the story clear and the characters sympathetic to audiences.

Reflecting on his own early experiences at the opera, he says: “I used to fall asleep a lot, absolutely, I really did and I never used to know the first act of any opera, I used to wake up in the interval and then try the second act.

“I set The Merry Opera Company up about 17 years ago now because I could see that opera was lovely but it was losing its audience and getting far too hoity-toity and snobby and the worst of it.

“It used to be really the theatre of the 19th century, so it was a great thing and I wanted to take it to places that didn’t really get opera.

“I also wanted to help young opera singers, young professionals, who spend six or seven years training and then are thrown out into the world and find it really difficult to get any work.

“Very few make it to the top, a few more make it to careers but they are mostly portfolio careers, they do other things.

“They are all brilliant musicians, complete naturals. More than 280 people have sung with us, and 43 have gone on to international solo careers, so we’ve helped them a bit. We’re not the only people who help them but we do large tours.

“This tour of Die Fledermaus has got 18 performances in it and that’s quite rare for these singers to get that length of tour to all sorts of different places, like churches, theatres, castles, a Wetherspoons pub, all sorts of things like that.

“So, they get a whole variety of things that stretch their ability to convince an audience, and when you’re in an opera, which after all is a suspension of disbelief, you have to do a lot to convince the audience.

“We get directors who have their own current international careers and who train and help these singers to create character, rather than just to stand and sing.”

In addition to Matthew’s role of Frank, the cast of Die Fledermaus comprises Conor Prendiville as Eisenstein, Bethan Terry as Rosalinde, Olivia Singleton as Adele and Chris Faulkner as Dr Falke.

Also featuring are Camilla Seale (Prince Orlofsky/Frosch) and William Diggle (Alfred). Stage director Guido Martin-Brandis and music director Elspeth Wilkes have worked with designer Sophie Lincoln, assistant director/stage manager Walter Hall, choreographer Carole Todd, lighting designer Beth Thomas, with set construction by Graham Wickens, photography by Bonnie Britain and publicity by Valerie Wong.

Matthew, who lives in Kent where he and his family rear sheep, cattle and goats, is pleased to be returning to the Kenton.

“We love coming to Henley, it’s a lovely theatre. We’ve been many times before and it’s quite a small stage so it’s really quite good.

“We first came to Henley in 2011 with a show called Troy Boy, which was La belle Hélène, that was directed by Kit Hesketh-Harvey. We then came in 2012 with La Traviata and in 2013 with The Magic Flute, then with our rather funny show in 2014 called Kiss Me, Figaro!, which was a wonderful take with music from Monteverde right through to Irving Berlin, all about backstage at the opera.

“We came in 2016 with La bohème, 2018 with The Marriage of Figaro, 2019 with The Pirates of Penzance and 2020 with Don Giovanni and that was just before everything closed down, I think we lost four performances on that tour, which started in early February.

“We go to places that have got very different-sized stages and so we have a set that fits into all these places.

“Henley has got a lovely catchment area and Oxfordshire is one of our regions we go to. We’ve been to various churches with other shows that we do, we do a stage Messiah type of thing.

“The idea is to make the shows enjoyable, a mixture of comedy and stuff.

“Even something like Die Fledermaus, the light Viennese operetta, has got its pathos elements and we want the audiences to identify with the characters, not just to laugh at them or to see them as cardboard characters but to try and identify and see themselves a little bit in them or to see other people, their friends, in them and that type of thing. We don’t go for the director’s ego that imposes things on it.

“Henley is important to us as a centre for us to come to and we’ve had good audiences there, we love it.”

• The Merry Opera Company presents Die Fledermaus at the Kenton Theatre on Friday, February 7 at 7.30pm. Tickets cost £30 and the show has a running time of two hours, 25 minutes. For more information, call the box office on (01491) 525050 or visit thekenton.org.uk