IN music theatre's early days, some 35 years ago, we were often confronted by musicians trying to act or actors trying to play. Black Hair, one of the sleekest groups around, reminded us on Tuesday that those times have gone, for good.
There was a sense of déjà vu about their opening. Robert Sherlaw Johnson's Triptych was cutting-edge in 1972. Flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano and percussion (naturally including marimba and vibes) gradually interconnected, but very much in the spirit of a bygone age.
That all changed with Anna Myatt's vocal pyrotechnics in Jennifer Walshe's As Mo Cheann (Out Of My Head). In sometimes barely audible conversation with Emma Welton's violin, she compelled attention to the music of tiny, everyday sounds. Damien Harron brought some amusing frenzy into Amber Priestley's musings with office equipment, inspired by Walt Whitman. But it was his own Control Freak that provided the evening's centrepiece.
With Anna Myatt "conducting" an increasingly disobedient quartet, she turned puppet-master, dressing them in gaudy wigs with klaxons under foot. Miraculously, her new robots began to jell.
Matthew Barlow proved undaunted by the haunting cello harmonics of John Stringer's Red Elegy and Maria Insua Cao's bass clarinet was equal to partnering "rain-forest" electronics in Ed Bennett's colourful Monster. Harron returned with a sensational monologue in Aperghis's Le Corps à Corps.
Moral: all music is theatre.
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