The Angel and the Red Priest
Few people, other than dedicated fans of Antonio Vivaldi and outright musicologists, would know much about his life story, nor the outrageous circumstances of it. Sean Riley (South Australian-based playwright) was told of it in London in 2004 and thereafter became obsessed with the need to tell it.
In 2005 ABC Radio National's drama unit commissioned Riley to write a radio play which turned out to be The Angel and the Red Priest Mk1. Adelaide Festival director Brett Sheehy then took it another step further with a commission for a stage adaptation for this festival. The result is an unusual and interesting play-with-music.
The play is set in Venice in an establishment peculiar to Roman Catholic Italy: here's what Riley writes in his program notes: "In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, the multitude of orphanages, hospitals, and other charitable and state-funded homes for the infirm situated in Venice - The Beggars, The Incurables, to name but two - gained notoriety as the musical pulse of the tiny water-locked city. Abandoned girls and women were trained, at the expense of the establishments, to be expert musicians. Concerts were given on a weekly basis and competition between them was fierce. But the Pieta, under the influence of their Red Priest, reigned supreme."
Vivaldi (Stephen Sheehan), with a shock of long red hair, is the Red Priest who worships music and his own talent rather more than is priestly. Little is known about his life, in reality, other than that he became a star in the early 1700s, was poached away to Vienna and died forgotten and a pauper 30 years later. In the absence of recording technology his music vanished until manuscripts were discovered in Mantua in 1934.
What happens in Riley's play is that although Vivaldi dislikes composing for the human voice he is forced to do so by fashion and Gastarini (Andreas Sobik), a Salieri-style nemesis who may or may not have stalked around with his nose in the air, but being a Roman Catholic poo-bah, probably did. Vivaldi bemoans the lack of decent sopranos in the Pieta cloisters, but as luck will have it, one of the inmates, the dreamer Agata (Johanna Allen), is heard singing as she goes about her chores. A muse is born. The piece he writes for his Angel is a triumph and, as predicted by the sadder and wiser and older Sister Zita (Kim Liotta) he leaves her behind when the world and success beckons.
The staging, with live music, is engaging: five female musicians form the diagonally placed backdrop and each takes part as chorus-style observers of the action. Led by Gabriella Smart on harpsichord, Emma Luker (violin) Anna Webb (viola) Zoe Barry (cello) and Hannah Cooper (oboe) are dressed in the plain garb of Pieta inmates and lend a poignant visual and aural element to the play: beautiful music soars from their instruments but they are condemned to a life of servitude and incarceration because of the prevailing moral climate.
Musically and dramatically, The Angel and the Red Priest has great potential. It's a terrific idea and a fascinating story but it is fatally hobbled at the moment by the writer and director being one and the same person. The direction is somnolent as each sentence is spoken in tones of reverent awe, then left hanging in the air for our admiration for a long moment before the next person speaks. Known for some pretty sprightly music, Vivaldi's story is told here as the stateliest of sarabands and it becomes wearisome.
The actors do their best in the circumstances and the result is charming and more than watchable. To succeed, as it easily could, beyond this production, The Angel and the Red Priest needs a different and dispassionate director and further work with dramaturg David Ryding. (Whose first sessions, apparently instigated by festival management, were described by Riley as "brutal and fruitful" - which gives one hope.)
