Music Theatre since 1990 - Schott Music

Synopsis
This is an opera with no story, but one that explores the critical moment within a story – a
crime story – and turns the spotlight on the person who creates this moment: the Author.
The primary ingredients of crime fiction are darkness, violence and damaged people plus, of
course, plot: the mechanics of the piece. Dark desires have to be played out, motive has to be
revealed, lines of investigation have to be followed and a resolution of some sort arrived at. But
for the writer, what’s really interesting about crime fiction is not joining the dots, but the dots
themselves: the set-pieces, the heightened moments of chaos and bloodshed.
In Crime Fiction, the Author is engaged in a struggle with himself to preserve unadorned the
moment he’s created, but his characters, the Woman and the Man, are starting to interfere.
Crime Fiction
28.03.2009 Millennium Centre Cardiff
Clive Barda / Arenapal
Crime Fiction comprises 12 miniature scenes in which an Author, imagining a Man about to
garrotte a Woman but withdrawing, meditates on the process of devising character and motive.
The Man and Woman come and go. In the end, the Author himself dangles the garrotting rope
above the supine Woman, and this cryptic, quasi-Beckettian, quasi-Pinterian little drama ends…
Watkins’s score opens with a gently pulsing violin figure, and from this the whole structure arises.
The fit between the music and the words is as intimate as the action displayed, though not in a
sadomasochistic way. Indeed, Watkins, in his first operatic essay, has contrived a textbook equilibrium
between those warring elements, the words always clearly projected, the music always
interesting but never carried away with itself. I wouldn’t have minded if occasionally it had been,
but I was gripped by the tautness, dark colouring, effortless climaxes and subtle close of what was
on offer. (Paul Driver, The Sunday Times, 5 April 2009)
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