Time for some serious music

Background music is meant to be appealing, but too often it drowns out meaning, writes James Conway

Halfway through the first act of Conor McPherson's production of Eden, by Eugene O'Brien, at the Abbey, I could tell it was a very good presentation of a fine play, with a pair of outstanding performances. I wondered, though, why someone had chosen to play what sounded like a bit of a recording of a Bulgarian women's choir at the top of the show. I wondered again when more atmospheric music guided us blandly out of the interval.

I guess I should be used to background music at the theatre. It's routine at the Abbey, the Gate and almost everywhere else. It helps make theatre like television, naming emotions so we don't have to have them, covering the scene-shifting and blending, soothing and tidying until the experience of those soldiering words is one of banality.

Jigs and reels and gobbets of quartets, samples of treasured CD collections or snippets overheard at dinner parties all fade in and out with ease over those high-hung speakers. It can even be taken as a sign of musicality when a director decides to "use" music - music that is a record of someone's creation and someone else's performance. I suppose you could think it fair play: after all, when a stage designer's light fingers have danced over books and catalogues art historical, nobody in the audience has the temerity to shout "plunderer!" during the first-night calls.

The problem is that Eden was otherwise so serious. Well, I thought it was serious, even though when the Bulgarian voices had faded there was a new, live soundtrack of titters and guffaws at each expletive, each sexual reference and each Offaly-accented signal of despair.

It was so serious you could think McPherson is that reviled character, a purist - that he might pursue purely all the impurity of words and of character, and the awful purity of fate, just for the sake of it.

The production was so good I should probably assume there was a serious point to the music that I just didn't get. Perhaps I need to open up to "sound design". In cinema, soundtracks can be revelatory, as in the work of Andrei Tarkovsky, Robert Altman and Terence Davies, so perhaps it is foolish to think it cannot transform new work in the theatre - think of Robert Lepage. Sound design should be a lot more sophisticated than it is in Irish theatre, though.

In the case of Eden, the amplified sound against the unamplified speech poses problems of context that the mirror ball in the auditorium only begins to address. In the case of another wonderful production at the Abbey, Katie Mitchell's version of Iphigenia, the recurrent taped bouzouki music was maddening. My memories of Mitchell's earlier, underrated Lower Depths, in the Peacock, are so good that I have convinced myself there were no twiddly sounds to suggest period.

Call me a purist (please), but sometimes I love to go to a play and hear no music, and to pay for the words (or the absence of words) with attention. Call me opinionated, but if we banned background music from theatre (and dance!), I'd be happy to hear some serious sound design.

That might seem strange, coming from someone who makes a happy living producing opera, but in opera you have to assume that music is meaning itself, not a signal of something else. Poor opera. It hardly ever gets to be serious - or, at least, to be taken seriously. Even some of its doughtiest fans are CD-trained authorities who repeat with mustard anecdotes of obesity, inanity, monstrous pride and tumbling monsters. How, then, should opera survive the gentler derision of those who may find the expressive language of singers - so utterly, wonderfully different from that of actors or dancers - too strange to recognise and enjoy?

Then, if an opera does get to the stage, there are more slings - arrows being far too serious - from journalistic foes. Outside Germany, I know of few arts journalists who would dare consider opera without cunning alliteration or trivialising anecdote - and fewer reviewers who have the imagination to assume opera production is the result of serious, intricate, generous collaboration. What a serious (not humourless) creature is that ideal critic, who combines intellectual curiosity and sentimental education.

Why don't opera critics accept, and why don't we seem to believe, that everything on the stage, foreground and background, means something? The more precisely and deeply it means it, the better. If it doesn't mean much - if, for example, a show is set in the Roaring Twenties just for a look, for an easy solution to supposed problems - then it's not very good. The meaning may not be entirely explicable or immediate, and that's fine.

The meanings of the show I am working on now, The Cunning Little Vixen, are so complex and compelling that it would take about as long to appreciate all of them as it took Janácek to compose the piece. Each production can clearly suggest but a few of them.

I think some people find it hard to be serious about music in theatre or about opera as theatre. Is there a connection? Perhaps there is a resistance to seriousness about opera, to the belief that opera productions should mean something, because of the music, after all - because the experience in theatre is that the music often speaks straight to the heart as it carries and transforms the text. We may not want to consider the heart's reasons as serious matters. We may not want to judge them, just as we may not want opera productions to address the meanings of music.

But it seems to me that the great thing about the theatre - of which opera is one of the noblest and most assailable forms - is that it is such a serious, lively and pleasing place for the heart, the mind and the moral sensibility. It must be possible to take it seriously, and with pleasure, even with the glasses in the bar rattling, the crowd giggling, the fake snow falling, the critic scratching, the programme explaining - even with the tape rolling of the estimable, pure-toned, mysterious voices of Bulgaria, topped and tailed for the end of the interval.