FULL VICE – A Jazz Opera (Jools Scott) London 2007
Information on the Performance
- Work Title: Vice
- Composer: Scott Jools
- Libretto: Sue Curtis based on The Revenger's Tragedy by Cyril Tourneur Libretto Text, Libretto Index
- Venue & Opera Company: Arcola Theatre, London, UK, Grimborn Festival
- Recorded: 2007
- Type: Staged Opera Live
- Singers: unknown
- Conductor:
- Orchestra:
- Stage Director: Sue Curtis
- Costume Designer:
Information about the Recording
- Date Published: 2020
- Format: Streaming
- Quality Video: 3 Audio:3
- Subtitles: nosubs
- Video Recording from: YouTube FULL VIDEO
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE
Vice is a savage re-imagining of Middleton’s 1606 play The Revenger’s Tragedy, a Jacobean tale of sex, intrigue and revenge.
Vice tells the story of Vindice, come to the court of a corrupt Duke in disguise in order to avenge the Duke’s murder of his beloved Gloriana. He swears upon her skull that he will destroy the Duke and his whole family. He keeps his word.
From the beginning Vindice demands our sympathy and so makes us complicit in his headlong fall from desire for justice, to lust for savage revenge, and, finally, to damnation. Despite our horror, we find ourselves unwilling for his rampage to stop, so irresistibly enjoyable is our collective descent into hell.
Reworking The Revenger’s Tragedy
This seductive and compelling story has been transformed from Jacobean tragedy to modern noir thriller by Sue Curtis’s poetic re-working of Middleton’s text and Jools Scott’s sensuous jazz-fuelled score. Moments of wit and eroticism are blended with heart-stopping visual horrors. A wild pace and macabre humour drive the irresistible surge of the music, lyrical, passionate and chilling by turns, capturing all the sardonic wit of the The Revenger’s Tragedy.
Firmly in the tradition of Kurt Weill, libretto and music combined take the original text by the throat and translate it into a vibrant new idiom. The interplay of acting, instrument playing and movement make this a theatrical delight – slick, fluid and funny, with an ironic humour that comes from creating an orgy with the aid of a tenor sax and poisoning a Duke to the rhythm of a tango.
Its themes of power, privilege, and the exploitation of women in a male world, together with the destructive force of violence and revenge, make it urgently recognisable to a modern audience.
Original and highly inventive, this is a ground-breaking piece that explodes the boundaries between music theatre, opera and classic drama and will appeal to a wide range of theatregoers attracted by the sexiness, outrageous humour and ravishing music of the piece.