Aspects of Love w/ Michael Ball - Lyric

I was in the Stalls, and it very much looked to me as if the front row is excellent, with an average sized person having eyes at around stage height. So you'd be looking up and may get a stiff neck, but you would likely see pretty much everything.

I was absolutely swept away by the sheer romanticism of this! Jonathan Kent is a genius, and this cast realises Kent's, and Lloyd Webber's, romantic visions to perfection.

Spoilers follow. . .

Forget everything the Southwark PR department said about this being a chamber piece, so the smaller the stage the better. Cos what Kent does with the Lyric stage is poetry in motion, a sweeping surge of romantic movement and images that took my breath away:

Projections suggestive of the fleeting nature of time, and the seasons, whether black and white cinematic images of frozen memories, or colourful birds taking flight, etc, sweep in and across the stage, signalling scene changes in a smooth motion which moves in time with the music.

The first half hour, in particular, is a simply dazzling and dizzying flow of romance in motion, in time with Lloyd Webber's glorious romantic music, as projections, stage framings, objects and actors on stage, all move in concert with that music. I felt utterly swept away. It is glorious!

"Love changes Everything" is, of course, everywhere in all this, and Jamie Bogyo gets his opportunity to close out the first half (aptly and splendidly) with a bit of it, but yes, the principal position of the song is pitched perfectly in Act 1 as the moment Michael Ball's George enchants Laura Pitt Pulford's Rose. It is an ingenious idea, attaching a most powerful song to a most significant dramatic moment in such a way that it does indeed change everything!

Ball has occasionally been known to inflate this song somewhat with bombast, in concerts, but the gentleness and subtlety, the tenderness and the heartfelt sincerity of the way his older wiser Uncle George introduces the song makes it oh so much more meaningful and credible.

Kent's experience with romantic operas, like his Tosca for the ROH, evidently informs his choices, his way of giving music primacy and synchronising it with movement and powerful images, creating crescendo upon crescendo of emotion.

Opera is often full of silly plot points, that have to be played with passion, and Kent's understanding of how to blend this melodramatic medium with heartfelt conviction shows itself in a kind of a Brechtian bridge between these two worlds: such as the moment he reveals the orchestra that has been hiding behind the curtain at just the moment we need to bridge the operatic and the real; or the moment he shows us a curtain on which caricatures of a theatrical audience are depicted, a reflection of ourselves in period clothing, mouths agape in wonder, reminding us that we too will one day be dead, just like the period audience on the curtain and sundry characters in the show. Kent shows us we are part of this operatic circus, reminding us of the preciousness of every fleeting moment.

All this culminates in a life (and death) affirming moment in the second half that feels pure rapturous Carmen in its staging, acting and romantic effect!

Laura Pitt Pulford is always brilliant, and she is again here, winding through moments of impetuous and winning humour up into moments of blazing sincerity and passion, as if effortlessly.

The passion is infectious, and all actors appear to be giving career bests, to me, swept along by Kent's direction and Lloyd Webber's music.

Jamie Bogyo's unfortunate reputation on this board, would appear thoroughly undeserved by his creditably emotive and melodic performance here, even while said reputation actually enhances his character's underdog position in the plot, where it is Alex's destiny to be bested by Uncle George in the same way Jamie's destiny would seemingly be to be bested by Uncle Michael. Fiction and a version of reality collide to create something better than both: fully realised art.

For those worried that this version of Aspects has been sanitised by age changes, and the like, I would agree with the creatives that these changes are very necessary in today's climate of performative outrage. But more importantly, I affirm that what we are watching retains a constant frisson of edge and danger: Bogyo's Alex still meets and dances with Rose's daughter, Jenny, while she is played by a child actor, causing audible intakes of breath by sundry audience members; and the adult Jenny's appearance in the red dress, so traumatic to Ball's George as a memory of his first wife, and so connected by Alex to Rose's wearing it, is staged so dramatically as to make many audience members gasp out loud.

All in all, this story does have silly elements, but somehow Kent acknowledges that and makes a strength of them, mirroring the ecstatic melodrama of opera to our own need for it, bittering the sweetness of Lloyd Webber's romantic music with an acute awareness of the passage of time and mortality, both for the characters and for us. A uniquely romantic and enchanting musical evening resulting in 5 stars from me.