Arrived lately a CD of Britten’s Noye’s Fludde, a setting of a late mediaeval popular play about Noah. Noah, his termagant wife and God are played by adults, the three sons and their wives by children and the animals by more and more children, all the way down to squeaking mice. The band has a core group of eight adults and more hordes of children who play strings, recorders, bugles and bells. Not to be left out, the audience join in singing two hymns, one at the beginning, uneasy and ominous, another at the climax of the storm (‘For those in peril on the sea’).
It’s one of my favourite works, for its skill and invention, its fun and its moments of theatre magic (the dances of the raven and the dove, the descent from the Ark while they sing Tallis’s Canon) but above all because here if anywhere is that ‘community theatre’ we were all on about in the 70s. It wouldn’t have counted then: