This is a review of Kate Waring's one-act opera* Are Women People ?
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3 April
This is a review of the matinee performance on Sunday 23 March (at Hughes Hall, Cambridge) of Are Women People ?, a one-act opera* by Kate Waring, which had been given its world premiere during the preceding evening
In her composer’s note, Kate Waring tells us that this work was inspired by, and uses material by, American writer and satirist Alice Duer Miller (1874–1942). Waring says that she wished to compose a comic opera last summer, and that it was devised by using poems by Miller ‘in which she reacted to quotations and news items of her day’ : the poems had been collected under the title given to this opera (the text is available here), a suitable volume that Waring had discovered, but had first appeared in a column in the New York Tribune (from February 1914 onwards).
That said, Miller’s words appear to have been transported, for Waring’s purposes, to a setting in England, sometimes with variable results, because a poem such as ‘The Revolt of Mother’ (see also below) contains the words in legislative hall, which sadly does not necessarily mean much in the UK. Likewise, the opera gives the impression, in setting ‘O, that ‘twere possible’, that Miller meant the British newspaper The Times, whereas the explanatory text in the book makes clear that the poem referred to the New York Times :
Oh, that 'twere possible
After those words inane
For me to read The Times
Ever again !
[At this point, Mr Webb was trying to chase his daughter, who was hiding from him, and the outcome was a facsimile broadsheet being torn into shreds]
After an overture (for select forces of clarinet, cello, and piano, our band for the piece), there was so much going on that this review is perforce of a highly selective nature : in addition to keeping an eye on the instrumentalists and quite a lively staging with three singers, there was also an ever-changing projection on a screen placed between the two trios (sometimes lyrics, sometimes cartoons, sometimes images) - and having chosen to be in the front row proved not to make managing it all any easier…
The piano (played by Alex Reid) began the opera quietly, but it did not take long to adopt an insistent fortissimo, although this subsided into softer Satie-like motifs in repeated semi-quavers. Attention then passed to the clarinet (Sarah Bowden), with some very pleasant harmonies from the cello (Jon Fistein), before the latter took a rich solo and then played pizzicato as the clarinet resumed. And so we came to the trying on of hats, as Amanda (Hazel Neighbour : soprano) entered down the aisle with her parents, but wearing a German spiked helmet.
The scene had been set with a hat-stand upstage, rich with all sorts of hats and scarves, and which clearly indicated that there were to be some changes of role (another feature of which to try to keep track). Mr Webb (Simon Wilson : baritone) and his wife (Jessica Lawrence-Hares : mezzosoprano) straightaway busied themselves with what there was to wear. By contrast, Amanda’s non-comformity was already patent, and it was matched by the quality of the writing for her, which, compared with that for Mrs Webb, had its own spikiness : most often, Mrs Webb’s part sounded like Michael Nyman’s most lyrical writing for voice.
A veneer of uniformity, as of a family resemblance, was given by all three singers having a whited oval on their faces, complete with red cheek circles, and so, when they later arranged themselves for a family portrait (please see below), they felt like puppets, Pinocchio, or (Waring’s reference) characters from the commedia dell’arte.
Closer inspection, though, revealed that Amanda had spider-like eye-lashes (a reference, perhaps, to eye make-up from The Hunger Games films ?), which made her seem more exciting than Mr and Mrs Webb**, less conventional : for, amongst other movements campaigning for change, one such as female suffrage inevitably faces the resistance of seeking to depart from the status quo. Amanda (it was not clear why) is much seen looking at a book called Keeping Pet Chickens (maybe an ironic comment on what women’s lives can be, i.e. they are as much ‘kept’ as chickens ?), and Waring yokes with this family a satire about someone called Willie turning 21 (who figures in the preceding poem to that addressed to Mr Webb) to give Amanda an unseen brother.
The approach to the libretto, not unusually, has been to fit the chosen texts to a scenario (so Willie’s absence is seemingly explained by being away on military service) : here, doing so gives us a new context to a poem that again satirizes a quotation from an anti-suffrage speech (it is possible that Miller’s quotation from it was read out). The dangers of war are then juxtaposed (in apostrophizing Amanda’s brother) with the alleged ones of voting (which include moral dangers, such as becoming coarsened or degraded) :
You must not go to the polls, Willie,
Never go to the polls,
They're dark and dreadful places
Where many lose their souls
Since war breaks out during the piece*** (i.e. The Great or First World War, which began on 28 July 1914 (whereas the States did not declare war on Germany until April 1917)), it may be that references to the unseen William, away at war, are to conflict elsewhere (for, to name but two troubled places, the territories of South Africa soon became involved [starting with The Maritz Rebellion] when the World War began, and in the preceding years there had been two Balkan Wars). Yet this instance is where one is less than clear what Waring intended, on account of how she marshalled her literary material (please see below).
Moving on through the piece, there was ample scope for Neighbour to hit high notes – which she did extremely nicely – in settings such as the one that ends with the couplet But in the midst of such enjoyments, smother / The impulse to extol your ‘sainted mother’ (‘Lines to Mr. Bowdle of Ohio’); to add telling gestures to an aria based on a skit called ‘The Maiden’s Vow’ (responding to the assertion that ‘Many girls […] had lost their souls through this study [sc. of algebra]’); and to hold a shiny tea-tray behind her father’s head, as if it were a halo, and then pretend that she did not (in ‘The Revolt of Mother’****).
This apart from bundling Mr Webb around, as if he were a rag-doll, and miming stoking him from behind, like a boiler (in ‘The Gallant Sex’), which Miller wrote because a woman engineer had been dismissed, and a new rule made that women shall not attend high pressure boilers. One gathers that Waring had graphically envisaged the stage-business, and that there was much to occupy one’s attention besides the music, and Miller’s witty, but purposeful, words.
In another number (apparently an adaptation of W. S. Gilbert, called ‘The Woman of Charm’), which started as a duet and ended as a trio, Miller rhymed ‘take off the scum’ with ‘residuum’, in ridiculing the notion that one could heat up the best bits of women such as the Sphinx, Cordelia and Cleopatra in a crucible (as conspicuous ladies of history) to obtain the desired sort of woman, who is ‘a mystery’.
On the screen we also had a full measure of wit, and so a photograph had been doctored with the heads of Obama and Thatcher to confront the equal absurdity, as of women getting the vote, of a black man as President of the States or a woman PM, and we were presented with a cartoon to depict ‘hugging a delusion’, with a figure clutching an object that bore the words ‘The Ballot’.
The cover image of the programme (and used in the publicity ?) was recreated when a smiling Amanda stood behind her less-than-cheery parents. A snapshot from a time of change, and it was coupled with the lyric ‘What Every Woman Must Not Say’, where, having listened to Mr Webb pontificate about women and their nature and concluding with asserting that they have no self-control, Mrs Webb bites back :
‘No, I don't admit they haven't,’ said the patient lady then,
‘Or they could not sit and listen to the nonsense talked by men.’
We see, again, a microcosm of change in Mrs Webb, coming closer to her daughter’s position, and Miller also gives us (in ‘Evolution’) the shifts in position of a Mr Jones, using quotations (whether or not fictitious), and matched by circling movements on stage. Mention on the screen of munitions and ‘every girl pulling for victory’ signalled that mobilization was in the air.
Stronger than mere intellectual arguments for and against changing women’s roles, the cast foreshadowed the changes that would unavoidably come with war by donning military helmets (which we may already have noticed the in the corner (where Amanda deposited hers at the start)). Thus – in a number where Miller reworked Kipling against him (‘Women’) – the patriotic angels are allowed work outside the home, although they had been told before that the home was their place, and Waring gave it a rhythmically precise setting.
In setting ‘Advice to Heroines’, she wrote a sharply chromatic line for Amanda, which Neighbour delivered with ease, and in which Miller re-used the metaphor from the title ‘Sometimes We’re Ivy, and Sometimes We’re Oak’, denoting a woman clinging to a man, or, in contrast, standing strong in her own right when bright-faced dangers shine when the hero is absent. (Yet, whatever women may do when the call comes, Miller wisely observes that it is only until men want their jobs back.) All too soon, on the screen, we had the fact displayed 5 August 1914 : Britain at war, which was reflected in Mrs Webb’s tonally uncertain aria, because William is at war.
As has been alluded to, a certain incisive angularity characterized settings for Amanda, whereas, for Lawrence-Hares, that of ‘A Suggested Campaign song’, for example, was rooted in a ground bass, and, suiting the secretive nature of the lyric, was of a more restrained nature : Miller had ironically written it – as if for the ‘anti’s – in response to another speech against suffrage : No one knows what we oppose and we hope they never will.
Waring gave us the poignancy of ‘Playthings’ (and with Reid beating a drum), as toy soldiers, guns and other weapons of war are not crowding the shops, which is not only as they’re made in Germany, but also because :
Perhaps another season
We shall not give our boys
Such very warlike playthings
Such military toys
However, she chose not to end the opera on that note, but with the spirit of further absurdity and contradiction, in a skit called ‘A Masque of Teachers’. This extended item took, as its basis, a bye-law of the New York Board of Education, in which each of Mr and Mrs Webb and Amanda took it in turns to be a would-be woman teacher : we hear that women who want to teach have to advance a dire circumstance concerning their husband, such as his wits are all astray – irrespective of what other reason the women have, and despite what they can otherwise offer, that factor alone qualifies them to teach.
Upon the husband’s circumstance being named, Miller has the members of the Board inappropriately rejoice Her husband’s doomed ! Hurray ! hurray ! about the position of ‘The Ideal Candidates’, thereby invoking the topsy-turvy logic, used to oppose women, that had been heard throughout the piece :
No teacher need apply to us
Whose married life’s harmonious
The performance closed with banners brought onto the stage, by Waring herself amongst others, which reminded us of this distance between 100 years ago and now (or lack of distance ?), including this one from Phyllis Diller (born in 1917) :
Housework can’t kill you, but why take a chance ?
Although Miller’s other poetry appears to better remembered, perhaps it seems a little tame compared with the sparky wit that, in common with Diller, she brought to this writing. The notion that the best work comes out of some sort of suffering, as a pearl from an oyster, may just be a conceit, but it does appear that, when she responded to contemporary issues, and then coined titles such as ‘Why We Oppose Votes for Men’ (from ‘Campaign Material’ For Both Sides)), she was creatively ‘fired up’.
The reservations expressed earlier in this review apart, Waring has therefore aptly found material in Miller’s Are Women People ? for her chosen purpose, and, with her two skilled trios of singers and instrumentalists (along with all those others involved), realised with flair her notion to compose a comedy – even if one did feel that the writing for the role of Mr Webb, compared with that for Amanda, gave Wilson relatively few chances to show his talents…
End-notes
* Its title is, in a way, more polemical than ironic, taken from a retort to a father from a son in an imaginary dialogue that introduces a collection of pieces first published in the New York Tribune, and dedicated to that newspaper (please see below).
** The family whom we see is called Webb, because a poem called ‘Our Idea of Nothing at All’ is addressed to a Mr Webb of South Carolina (it is responding to a quotation from a speech that he made against suffrage for women).
*** Although, equally, the opera does not appear to be absolutely chronological as to every detail (we are given notice of the outbreak of war on the screen), but does seem to follow the order in which Miller’s poems have been collected in the book.
**** Which ends with this stanza :
I am old-fashioned, and I am content
When he explains the world of art and science
And government—to him divinely sent—
I drink it in with ladylike compliance.
But cannot listen—no, I'm only human—
While he instructs me how to be a woman.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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