| Product: |
Wilton's Music Hall |
| Date: |
10/04/03 (311 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: quality of music, affordable price, historic building
Disadvantages: needs a facelift
Wilton's was the first purpose-built music hall, and survives today in something remarkably close to its original state, though currently in very faded splendour. Derelict for many years, it has lately become the home of Broomhill Opera, a company of absolutely top class singers in the early stages of their professional career, dedicated to bringing opera to a wider audience.
The wider audience doesn't so far include our taxi driver, who had never heard of the place and needed the location map I had printed off from the website.
Imagine the sort of London East End alleyway that's part newly rebuilt flats, part building site and part seedy run-down area that might be the haunt of winos and disreputables. Wilton's is the seedy run-down bit! Go inside and, once through the vestibule (of old bricks bereft of paint or plaster) you enter an auditorium rather like a nineteenth-century nonconformist chapel - gallery round three sides, supported on barley-twist pillars, and instead of communion table and pulpit just a stage with modern stage lighting installed. The seating is basic, the walls of stripped brickwork, the ornate plaster on the front of the gallery much in need of patching up and painting. It is dim and dingy, but you can see how magnificent it could be once funds are found for its full restoration.
For now, it has a repainted ceiling (when Broomhill took it over, the roof leaked, so that had to be fixed, along with modern toilet facilities and wiring) in barrel-vault shape, which gives good acoustics.
I went for "Orion", an opera by Cavalli (17th-century); the quality of the singing was outstanding, the music easy on the ear, the stage business fun, the costumes splendid (a showcase for London fashion students), the set pretty well non-existent. Sung in English, the story came over clearly without recourse to the programme notes (which you'd have needed a torch to read anyway).
At one po
int, some of the stage lights fused. Someone apologised, and we waited about ten minutes while they sorted the problem out. In the very next scene, Orion (once blind, but now with his sight restored by the gods) is being encouraged by his travelling partner who points out that their situation is not so bad: I think the official words were something like "You've got your sight back", but of course on this occasion it had to be "You've made the lights work!" Much merriment in the house.
Mr Wilton built this music hall as a back room to his pub, which is now the bar to which audiences retire during the interval (and from which the sea monster and Charon's barge trundled into view for this performance). It's too basic at the moment - it would be wonderful if it could be restored as a glittering Victorian pub, but Broomhill's raison d'etre is opera, and that is beyond criticism. Don't go for the beer, go to hear the wonderful voices, to marvel at the music, and to let your imagination run riot over the decayed splendour of the hall.
I understand the company put on some performances on a "pay what you can afford" basis; if you paid what they deserve, it would be a lot.
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