It smells of cold sea-graves in here, of sea-wrecks, of sea-death

On Thursday night, I went with fleurdelis28 and sharhaun to see Peter Maxwell Davies' The Lighthouse at the Boston Lyric Opera. I had never heard of the piece before the season was announced; I saw that it was based on the story of the Flannan Isles light, though frankly with that title I'd have bought tickets anyway. It is a sea-haunting drawn from a historical mystery. There are two performances left. If you live anywhere in the Boston area and care for anything where singing brings in the dead and seals might be lost souls—or cormorants, or cats prowling the rocks—go see it. I wish they had the finances for a recording.

It is a small opera: seventy-five minutes, chamber orchestra and three singers. The staging in the JFK Library's Smith Hall is not quite as immersive as, say, the premiere of Eugene O'Neill's Bound East for Cardiff, but it's still an evocative match to the opera's atmosphere. The back of the stage is a wall of windows looking out on Dorchester Bay. The sets are the stylized skeleton of a lighthouse—a table, some chairs, a painted ladder, three similarly abstract buoys at the points of a triangle around the audience—and the darkened water beyond the reflecting panes, the faint lights of the skyline faraway red and white. The prologue is the collective, not entirely congruent testimonies of the three officers of the relief ship who found the lighthouse deserted; they give us the known facts of the disappearance, the half-finished meal, the chair knocked over, the workings of the light in perfect order, no equipment gone, and an inexplicable, overwhelming sense of something terrible and strange. We could find nothing wrong, except as we say. No signs of violence. No signs of anything. From beyond the glass—outside, where the harbor is—a white light begins to circle, faster, inexorably, sweeping the audience round, the officers freeze in their nervous contradictions: The lantern went automatic. The lighthouse is now automatic. Empty. The lighthouse is now automatic. The lighthouse is abandoned. Its ghosts are shut in. Sealed tight. The lighthouse is dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Except for its robot lantern . . .

It is probably not fair to anyone to say that the main action of the opera—titled in the program "The Cry of the Beast"—is like the best bits of Peter Grimes and The Turn of the Screw together, especially since Davies' clanging, shape-changing, sea-ridden music didn't actually remind me of Britten except when it was imitating folk styles, but I thought of the comparison more than once and it wasn't a bad thing by me. We are introduced to the original lighthousekeepers as they sit down to the latest in an endless round of tea and oatcakes; they are quickly drawn and just as quickly shown to be in an untenable situation. Arthur (David Cushing, bass) is a fire-breathing Bible-belter, stiff-backed with sanctimony, every other word out of his mouth deliverance or depravity as if he were preaching for the Salvation Army. Blazes (Christopher Burchett, baritone) is wittier and nastier, a lanky slouch with flick-knife-quick movements, nipping brazenly from a hip flask and taunting Arthur with intimations of secrets he knows. Sandy (John Bellemer, tenor) is the overstrained peacemaker, a dark-haired worrier with something both clownish and troubled in his diffident round face. Any two of them together, fine. Arthur and Blazes would still loathe one another violently, but one-on-one they'd be deadlocked. Sandy could simply ignore Arthur when he started banging on about the dark seas of sinfulness and salvation's light; Blazes' smirking insinuations might wear on him, but at least the two of them are on good enough terms to play cards. All together, though, they chafe, they play one off another, they can find no stable configuration. Overdue for relief with the winter storms, they are primed to explode. And they do, but not perhaps quite as expected. The mystery of the Flannan Isles light turns out to be, in Davies' secret history, not so much what made them disappear as what happened right before they did. They don't turn on one another. They turn on themselves.

( We thought they were safely drowned. )

And the simplest effects of theater are the most devastating. It is the flash of the automatic lantern from the other side of the glass that tells us from the beginning, whether we want to hear it or not, that no one we are watching is real: ghosts only, playing and replaying endlessly to the unexpiating accompaniment of the sea. It's on the harbor-side of the windows, in the unseeing, living world. We're in here with the sea and its dead. God, just go on keeping the Beast from the door. The paths through the audience over which the relief keepers walk are the black rocks of Eilean Mòr, spattered whitely with guano; they are the black coats of mariners, crushed flat as shale, their trodden brass buttons a dull mica glint. We didn't see until after the opera was over and we had to cross them to hear the talkback. It was like an image from Kipling, never-remarked. I want to show the libretto to rushthatspeaks and ask them to read a configuration for me, because all throughout the story, equally undercurrent, is the Tarot. Before the singing, Sandy invites Blazes to a game of crib—Blazes cheats, but that isn't the point. Arthur, tending the light aloft while they play, begins to prophesy, but for once he's on the mark: he is telling their game, what it really is, not pips or flushes, eight and two pairs, but the Wheel of Fortune, the Devil, the Fool. The Moon. The lighthouse is the Tower of the pack. Of course it cannot do anything but fall.

I am going tonight to see the Anarchist Society of Shakespeareans' Measure for Measure, which will be something completely different. I expect to enjoy it. The Lighthouse has still set the bar high for theater this year. And for the sea. And ghosts.