Allow me to introduce an extraordinary new opera talent: the Finnish diva Hanneke Mikkerknikkerlen. Raised with reindeer, she sings in an obscure Lapp dialect. Her performance is exhausting in its visceral power. One moment she bares her teeth in wild rage; the next she cowers in desperate sadness. Her
lyrico spinto soprano envelops the gut-wrenching aria
The Golden Typewriter. Hold on a minute. Golden what? Is this some long-lost Gian Carlo Menotti sequel to The Telephone? ’Fraid not, folks. Ms Mikkerknikkerlen is an invention of the Impropera Company and her first performance was, sadly, her last. As their name suggests, Impropera improvise opera. Like Whose Line Is It Anyway?, whatever the audience suggests, the ensemble of six — four singers and two musicians — will perform in a 45-minute non-stop opera. The whole shebang is improvised — plot, characters, entire score.
To get a feel for what Impropera do, I’m invited to a bespoke performance where I encounter The Foreign Opera Singer. From my suggestions — a country: Finland; a precious object: the golden typewriter — Mikkerknikkerlen emerges. The contralto Morag McLaren then delivers a full aria in total gibberish, translated into a lunatic tale by the baritone Niall Ashdown. The performance is accompanied in suitably Shostakovichian tones by David Pearl on piano. The result is hilarious.
You don’t have to be an opera buff to enjoy Impropera. They cleverly use creations, like our foreign friend, and games to familiarise the audience with ideas of arias, characters, different musical styles. By Act II the audience is loosened up and volunteering ideas. Suggestions for characters and plots need not be clever or topical. In fact, as Ashdown says: “The blander they are, the more fun you can have. There’s loads of mileage in a milkman whereas if someone suggests a musical take on the mid-term elections it’s like, Christ!” In Impropera’s hands, suggestions invariably turn into convoluted plots.
In Copenhagen the group improvised the tale of Geos, a dispossessed Greek prince and his servant Kevin, freed from an enchanted island by two shipwrecked sisters. Who could forget the duet Put Your Ear to the East and Your Hair to the West? Musical styles jump from Gershwin to reggae — though Impropera reserve the right to refuse Bach or Mozart for the nth time.
To my ponderous brain, the entire enterprise sounds like a nightmare of tongue-tying excruciation. And obviously, being improvisation, there is no chance to rehearse. Instead the team practise with challenges: be as authentically Rossini as possible! Perform an a cappella Baroque chorus.
All six are well versed in opera. McLaren has sung with Welsh National and Scottish Opera, besides starring in a one-woman cabaret and The Phantom of the Opera. The soprano Susan Bisatt sings with ENO and Opera North. The ensemble’s two musicians, Pete Furniss, a genius on sax, clarinet and recorder, and Anthony Ingle, Impropera’s musical director and pianist, studied at the Guildhall School of Music and direct at the London Academy of Music and Drama, respectively.
Niall Ashdown is the slightly odd one out; a Comedy Store regular seeking a broader knowledge of opera.
They are led by David Pearl who, aged 8, made his singing debut at Covent Garden. Pearl learnt to perform on the hoof as part of the UK’s first opera serenading service. Pearl tells a story of being hired — he’s convinced — by the Russian mafia. When he arrived at a posh hotel, “a babushka came to the door with rollers in her hair and behind her was this guy with several broken noses. I just thought: sing well. Sing well and get out.”
Impropera started out as a rehearsal technique for another David Pearl group, Opera Circus. “We realised that in among all the nonsense there was something genuine,” he says. “That actually it was a legitimate artistic endeavour.”
This will sound highfalutin if you have thus far imagined Impropera to be Radio 4’s I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue with vibrato. What Impropera creates is hilarious, but it’s also sublime. Mikkerknikkerlen and her typewriter are immensely funny, yet when McLaren sings sorrowfully, “Upon the key ‘P’ is the thumbprint of my lover. He’s gone”, it is truly tragic.
More remarkable still, improvisation blows away opera’s posturing and hackneyed mannerisms. It’s a treat to see “creativity in full force”, as Ashdown describes it. One suspects that the grand opera directors ache for this type of bold, fresh performance. So much of opera is a passive experience: punters wallowing gormlessly in the tunes or, worse, snoozing off as the interval tipple takes effect. Impropera demands your attention. “The audience know we don’t know where it’s going and this causes a little crisis in people. They’re thinking, ‘Don’t let it drop.’ Then you’re together and it’s a fantastic feeling.”
Impropera is a tight-knit group, with much the same line-up as when it started eight years ago. After so long, the group has an almost psychic ability to pick up one another’s ideas. But there is something else: a sense of “being sung” rather than singing.
Pearl recalls a poignant performance when Ashdown played a gardener who had died and a tree now grew over his grave. “We all felt there was a seventh member of the company present. Sometimes it’s like having a Ouija board on stage and the joy is in following it.
“It’s not from the head,” says Pearl. “It’s opera from the heart. And it grabs people by the guts.”
Impropera perform Made Up, Jermyn Street Theatre, Jermyn Street, London SW1 (www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk 020-7287 2875), Tues-Dec 23
