Review: ITCH, Opera Holland Park

If you’ve met the young Oliver Sacks in his memoir, Uncle Tungsten, or Christopher Boone in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, you’ll know a boy (always a boy) like Itchingham Lofte. He’s the bright kid who’s overly invested in accumulating all the elements of the Periodic Table, awkward but harmless, barely ready for the world beyond his nest-like bedroom.

That world comes crashing into his life when he buys a rock that might be uranium ore from the shoreline drifter, Cake, and discovers that the ancient Cornish mines may just have yielded up a new element, the Earth perhaps saving the Earth through a new source of energy. His teacher, the disaffected Nathaniel Flowerdew, is soon on to the find and steals the rock as his ticket back into favour with Greencorps Energy and his passport to riches. But the new element is poisonous, doing the same to its handlers as radium did to the Curies, and Itch realises he must take the rock back from whence it came and save the Earth from the people who would use its gift solely for their own benefit.

If there’s holes aplenty in the plot of Simon Mayo’s bestseller (libretto by Alasdair Middleton), such can be forgiven in a Young Adult novel in return for the pace that opera so often needs to reach beyond its core audience. For all but a slightly underwhelming last 20 minutes, Itch’s plight grips the house, event piled upon event with a very sinister undertow of child trafficking that forces oneself to consider the concept of exploitation in its wider context. 

Of course, name recognition of the source material and its author will help a new opera, but it will always stand or fall on its fusion of music, voices and performance. Jonathan Dove’s score, superbly played by the City of London Sinfonia, will not have you tapping your toes nor whistling its hooks on the bus home, but that never did Stephen Sondheim any harm in musical theatre and Dove’s intense compositions continually illustrate the characters and, especially, their mental states. In that key aspect of opera, he is served wonderfully well by Frankie Bradshaw’s spectacular set, a gigantic Periodic Table that, like its inspiration, appears (with a little from Really Creative Media’s video projections) to be able to combine to make up anything that’s required.

One felt a little for the singers on a wet Wednesday night, rain beating a dissonant accompaniment on the roof all through the first half in this beautiful, if somewhat challenging, venue. But Adam Temple-Smith finds his feet immediately as the protagonist, his relationship with his sister (Natasha Agarwhal) as tight as their tenor and soprano. The pitch of voice helps of course, but he has to locate the gaucheness of the teen, the body too big to be controlled by the brain, the fear eating into the soul - and he does. If we don’t believe in Itch, we don’t believe in the opera.

Nicholas Garret makes for an evil villain, catching something of Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’s Mr Slugworth’s look in his selfish pursuit of vindication and power. The rest of the eight strong ensemble cast are well up to the standards set by Opera Holland Park, but the standout is James Laing, whose ethereal countertenor lends his rock-collecting surfer dude an otherworldly quality that makes you believe he alone could find such otherworldly stones.     

Any fan of the books (and they are by no means confined to its YA target market) will delight in seeing their hero brought to life on stage. They’ll also, as much by osmosis (if we’re talking chemistry here) absorb the unique storytelling capacity of opera, how we feel as much as see Itch’s hopes and fears, how an actor conveys their emotions through their singing as much as, more than really, their words and deeds, how a vast space can be filled with an intimate aurality. One for opera’s old fans and new. 

Itch is at Opera Holland Park until 4 August

Photo Credit: Jake Wiltshire

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