Review: "Mamzer Bastard"

The Hackney Empire is a close space. There are no bad seats, but if you’re any taller than me, your knees press into the back of the person in front. In June, it is hot and stuffy, and when the lights go down, pitch black. For an opera so committed to feeling stifled, that gropes into the chaos and confusion of the 1977 New York blackout, it is pretty much perfect.

If Na’ama Zisser’s Mamzer [“Bastard”] (libretto by Samantha Newton and Rachel C Zisser) is about anything, it is about free will and pressure. Yoel, a twenty-year-old Hasidic Jewish man (Collin Shay), is squeezed into the present moment of the night before his wedding, the lineage of his forefathers stretching behind him and the uncertainty of an arranged marriage ahead of him. While all of the action takes place in this one night, a series of well-paced departures transport the audience episodically into Yoel’s psyche. The present looms large: 1970s New York and illicit curiosity for its pop-culture trappings interjects Yoel’s life of ultra-orthodox devotion. We see him secreting comic books and a transistor radio in the front of the stage as a child (sung by Edward Hyde), which merge seamlessly into soft porn and cigarettes at the end of the prologue. In a beautifully sensuous monologue at the mikveh [ritual bath] which ripples with erotic desire, he sings of stealing two dollars from his father’s wallet to see a movie, being asked “Star Wars or Annie Hall?” by the vendor, never having heard of either, but being dazed by his attraction to her. Shay’s countertenor voice, with all of its affective baggage of gender transgression and high-pitched anxiety, is perfectly suited to this role. These snapshots of the secular are little others, heightening the intensity of a life lived in such strict adherence to the total immanence of God.

The power surge at the end of the bath aria was the most sensorially overwhelming moment of the opera, flooding the stage with the unbearably bright light of Yoel’s desirous curiosity before plunging him—and the rest of New York—into darkness. It is during this central section of the opera, under the cover of the dark, that his past is radically altered. Yoel’s namesake, his mother’s former husband, whom she presumed to have died in the Holocaust, to be very much alive. That Yoel is a "bastard" is not so much treated as a revelation as a making-unavoidable of the truth; a falling-into-place of the "curse" of anxiety already felt. It sparks a particularly effective episode when we see Yoel and his younger self side-by-side at his upsherin [first haircut]. Re-organising the past disturbs two presents; the identity of one person is bifurcated across time. Shay and Hyde merge into one beautifully in this scene, countertenor and boy soprano blending into unisons, with compellingly similar bodily mannerisms.

Edward Hyde as young Yoel and Collin Shay as Yoel.

There is a central paradox in Rabbinic literature between preordination and free will, with God existing outside of time in the maxim that “all is in the hands of Heaven except the fear of Heaven". This maxim resonates throughout Mamzer, and the fear of heaven is practically embodied by Cantor David (Netanel Hershtik, who is also lead Cantor of Hampton Synagogue). He does not deal in dialogue, he intones liturgy and breaks into episodes of traditional song. His tonal harmonies and electronic organ accompaniment set him apart as the polar other to the pop culture interjections. Estranging Yoel from the other direction, he is an ideal of piety, in many ways as unattainable as the woman at the cinema; his sugary baritone melodies and embodied vocation as holy singer are the aural antonyms to a New York accent speaking, “Star Wars or Annie Hall?” through a loudspeaker. But between the two Yoel is, once again, squeezed.

Ultimately, Mamzer is a fascinating traversal of this theological paradox, humanly played out at this hinge in a life.  Yoel’s reconciliation (of sorts) is a humbling one. Demanding “no explanation” from his mother (Gundula Hintz), he quietly assumes his generational baggage of simply continuing in the wake of the devastation of so much knowing. There is a double-think and a bitter-sweetness to the kiss of blessing that his mother plants on his forehead, and the final few seconds of rising electronic and orchestral cacophony made no pretension of either tragedy or triumph; more time collapsed into one place as Yoel proceeds to his preordained-chosen wedding. The noise conveyed all of the ambivalence of Deuteronomy’s “choose life”.

Manifestly, this really is an excellent premise for an opera. It has a clear form that paces well, with tensions in all the right places. Mamzer is very nearly very good. All it really needed was for Zisser to trust her audience more. The libretto was already structurally tight without needing refrains all over the place, which over-signalled and started to make it feel bitty. Modal harmonies, while obviously appropriate, were perhaps a little too obvious, and over-used at the expense of dramatic motion. Bits of the text were conversely too on-the-nose; we can gather the point in Yoel’s mother pricking her finger without her having to exclaim, “I have stained the wedding dress with my blood!”. You would have to completely not be paying attention to miss all of the motifs, which could have been integrated more subtly (although I did enjoy the passacaglia feeling towards the end). Most of all, though, the harmony could have had way more grit in it, and the chamber orchestra’s timbres more bite wrung out of them. A more densely chromatic score with a less inhibited palette of orchestral colours would have better set David’s songs apart, to greater effect, and left Zisser with more breathing space for ambiguity at moments of intimacy.

If there was an intimacy problem in Mamzer, though, it can be chalked up to the, honestly, very terrible direction. Jay Scheib did not do a good job here, and his decision to have all of the action followed around by a camera-bearing actress spoiled so many moments. Her evening dress meant that there was virtually no point at which the stage only contained characters in Jewish dress, detracting from the social seclusion that is so central to the text. Yoel’s frequent solitude, also central, was disrupted, as were plenty of moments of potential intimacy. Worst of all, the live projection on the wall not only flattened everything but had an enormously distracting time-lag. It felt like everything had been downloaded from Limewire. I can see the readings that might have justified Scheib’s decision (a sense of detachment, the pressure of scrutiny, etc.), but ultimately it just boiled down to a bit of lazy ennui-signalling and simply didn’t work. It’s a shame, because the cast were consistently excellent.

Another barrier to intimacy was the use of amplification, which flattened the sound to a disappointing degree. Perhaps this was a demand of the space, and admittedly it enabled a smooth integration of the cinema-vendor’s recorded, disembodied speech. But I have a hunch that such an integration could have worked without amplified singers, but instead with electronics worked more prominently into the score. The fading in and out of the radio set an electronic soundscape up beautifully in the prologue, to the effect that the already rather safe chamber orchestration was rendered pretty underwhelming. My favourite moments of Mamzer—the opening, the bath-aria, and the final moments—all incorporated electronics, and these are the moments when Zisser’s score felt less inhibited, and most alive.

I saw Mamzer on closing night, and almost didn’t because of the lukewarm reviews. But I think that the broadsheets have been pretty universally lazy and unfair about this one, especially given that this was essentially a young composer’s PhD project. Zisser is one to watch, and if Mamzer is revived (under a different director), this fascinating exploration of Jewish identity and sacrifice is definitely not to be missed.