The Knot Garden

A house, too, can be a battlefield, and a garden a wilderness. The house here belongs to Faber and Thea: middle-class, middle-aged, probably more than middle-income and in a mid-matrimonial rut of mutual laissez-faire. Also in the house is their young ward Flora, to whom Faber has been making sexual advances. And there are visitors. Thea’s sister Denise is taking a break from other distant battlefields, where she is engaged in the struggle against oppression. A black writer, Mel, is here as well with his white lover Dov, a musician: the first homosexual couple to be ‘out’ on the operatic stage. These people’s entanglements—with each other but also, and more importantly, within themselves—have to be addressed, as in Tippett’s first opera. But this time the Mozart model is Così fan tutte, and the lessons of myth are clothed in the language of psychiatry, as practised by Mangus, the Don Alfonso who may not be as much in control as he would hope. In the last act he stages a performance of The Tempest, which comes adrift. Perhaps more has been achieved in the middle act, a swirl of short scenes ending in an exchange of songs between Flora and Dov—an exchange, too, of homages to Schubert and the blues, both held in the magic of this lustrous score. (Paul Griffiths)