The Spectator - 15 May 2004
Love on-line
Michael Tanner
The Battersea Arts Centre always has a programme worth considering, and its current Opera Festival, though less grand than the name might suggest, includes a piece by Michael Oliva, Black and Blue, which is very professionally performed and deserves the treatment it's awarded. There is an in interview with Oliva in the May number of Gay Times in which he hopefully compares his work to Jerry Springer - The Opera, but what he's done is vastly superior to that bit of mindless trash.
Black and Blue is an orginal and sometimes thoughful lyrical treatment of looking for sex/love via the internet. Oliva and Deepak Kalha, the librettist, have taken on more than they can cope with in under two hours, giving the subject a 'darker' resonance by building into it the story of Dennis Nilsen, serial gay killer; and hence, I'd have thought, confirming against their wishes the idea that round the corner from every gay assignation there is a murderer waiting to vent his drustrated passion and loathing. The plot, what there is of it, is hard to follow, thanks to synthesisation and over-amplification.
There are four singing actors, three instrumentalists and a conductor, whose constant loudsniffing almost spoiled the show. It many not sound appealing, but the tensions of communicating on the Web, meeting, finding gratification and then wondering what more there might be, are conveyed with suggestive force and with courageous and proficient performances especially from Andy Morton and Darren Fox, both of whom I suspect have fine voices. I may go again - it's on until the end of the month.
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