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ANIMAL HOUSE
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A few years ago, Revels staged an ambitious production of a mystery-play cycle at the BCA’s Cyclorama. This past weekend, at Cambridge’s First Congregational Church, the company made its operatic debut with four sold-out performances of Noye’s Fludde, Benjamin Britten’s 1958 one-hour transformation of the Chester-cycle mystery play in which Noye tries to entice Mrs. Noye into the ark but she’s having too good a time talking and drinking with her gossips. Along with the Second Shepherd’s Play from the York cycle, it’s the most celebrated of the mystery plays, and with good reason: Noye is wroth but patient — he loves his wife — and Mrs. Noye cares about her friends (the original meaning of "gossip" was "godparent") and doesn’t want to leave them behind. Britten wrote Noye’s sons, their wives, and all the animals as children’s parts, and Revels followed in that spirit by giving us an orchestra of mostly young people. They were deployed in the organ transept of the First Church, with a battery of brass in one corner of the rear balcony (Revels founder John Langstaff, playing God, was in the other). The "stage" started out as an unpromising set of steps with one towering spindly palm tree, but soon a brick-colored ark was brought on and assembled in two shake’s of a lamb’s tail, and the palm was stripped of its leafy top (Mrs. Noye claimed that for her table centerpiece) and pressed into service as a mast. Revels’ ability to make something out of nothing was likewise evident in Mary Azarian’s costumes, mostly white with black and shades of gray, almost as if made from newspaper, and extending to whiteface and, for Noye’s daughters-in-law, mop-white hair. Not just a mediæval touch, it set up the climactic moment when God promises not to send another flood and a rainbow — in this case a huge kaleidoscopic semi-circle that unfolded across the chancel — appears in token of that vow. Langstaff was an authoritative God, and Paul Guttry and Lynn Torgove brought professional singing voices and distinctive characterization to the Noyes. The children who enacted their sons and daughters-in-law were hard put to project over the 45-piece orchestra, and I wish Revels had used real dancers instead of children for the raven and the dove. The animals, all 112 of them, were played by children from six local schools and choirs; clad simply in black, they trooped into the ark carrying black-and-white animal masks aloft: parrots, pandas, elephants, skunks, just about any creature imaginable. They made an effective chorus, and when the ark was being tossed about by the storm, they were chilling against the massive discordant brass of "Eternal Father, Strong To Save." Even the packed house distinguished itself on that and the two other hymns Britten wrote for the audience to sing along with the performers. When your material is this good, success is no mystery.
BY JEFFREY GANTZ
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