Lights on Theatre | Miss Havisham’s Wedding Night
September 13, 2024, Chippen Street Theatre, Chippendale, NSW
Making their Australian debut at Sydney Fringe 2024, Lights On Theatre brings a bold new interpretation of Dominick Argento’s 1981 mono-opera Miss Havisham’s Wedding Night. Under the creative direction of Spark Sanders Robinson, the UK-born collective has seamlessly blended shadow puppetry with classical opera to create a striking performance that redefines traditional opera.
Argento’s one-act opera delves into the emotional turmoil of Charles Dickens’ infamous character from Great Expectations. The libretto by John Olon-Scrymgeour, combined with Argento’s expressive score, explores themes of memory, time, and lost love, drawing on the mad scenes of Bel Canto composers like Donizetti and Bellini. Here, Miss Havisham is portrayed as a woman trapped in an endless loop of her past, “a state disturbingly familiar in a contemporary context of isolation and mental entrapment”, says Sanders Robinson. “Miss Havisham is both attached to her memory, replaying it nightly, hoping it will have a different ending, and routinely tormented by the same result.” By casting two singers, Sarah Ampil and Sophie Rogut, as different facets of Miss Havisham, Robinson explores memory as an almost physical character, a ghost haunting every scene.
The performance opens with Jorde Heys’ Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, a song cycle set to sonnets by 16th-century poet Lady Mary Wroth. This work acts as a prologue, and is sung by Miss Havisham’s Nanny, played by Elizabeth Cooper, a shadowy figure tidying the space after the night’s recurring drama. Wroth’s sonnets, reflecting the tension between personal desire and societal expectation, mirror the tragic isolation of Dickens’ character. Heys’ composition, brought to life by Cooper’s rich and emotive vocal range and Nathaniel Kong’s sensitive piano accompaniment, offers an introspective exploration of love and loss. The staging was simple yet effective, with Nanny moving around a white room littered with signs of Havisham’s madness, including an empty laudanum bottle.
The opera itself plunges into the psyche of Miss Havisham, with Ampil’s portrayal of the older Miss Havisham capturing a masterful madness, her voice conveying the character’s anguish and despair, while Sophie Rogut’s portrayal of a younger Miss Havisham and Estella went from sweet and innocent, to convincingly crazy with one almighty blood curdling scream. The interplay of stunning shadow puppetry, designed by Jacqueline Chapman, added a surreal, dreamlike quality to the production. From overgrown foliage to bustling street scapes and weblike shadows the puppetry served as a magically dark extension of Havisham’s fractured psyche, representing the ghosts of her memories and the passage of time.
Lighting, puppetry and music combined for a most absorbing and well-executed performance, painting a portrait of Miss Havisham as a woman endlessly reliving her trauma, trapped between the allure of memory and the futility of changing the past. The musical and theatrical elements evoked a visceral emotional response, shedding contemporary light on one of Dickens’ most infamous characters.
