She Could Have Danced All Night

Two singers–from opposite ends of the spectrum–take the limelight

- Michael Billington

YOU wouldn’t expect a play about Glyndebourne from David Hare—he’s usually associated with scathing critiques of contemporary society—but, in The Moderate Soprano, now at the Duke of York’s, he’s written a beautiful, touching play that not only explores the foundation of the Sussex opera house in 1934, but also provides that rarest of things in modern theatre: a celebration of married love.

His basic point is that a quintessentially English institution owes its initial success to European emigré talent. It was John Christie, a former Eton schoolmaster and benign eccentric, who had the vision to create an opera house in rural East Sussex: it was his wife, the soprano Audrey Mildmay, who had the practical wisdom to realise her husband’s dream.

However, the play leaves you in no doubt that Glyndebourne’s pre-war reputation rested on three refugees from Hitler’s Germany: conductor Fritz Busch, director Carl Ebert and intendant Rudolf Bing, later a pillar of the Edinburgh Festival and the Metropolitan Opera.

Sir David makes much sport out of the initial conflicts between Christie, who wanted to christen the house with Parsifal, and the imported triumvirate that saw that Mozart was the ideal composer for an intimate jewel-box of a theatre.