Disorderly House
comissioned by Buxton International Festival
Opera Short
Cast
Bobby Britt
Robert
Harold
Constance
Chorus
Baritone
Baritone
Counter tenor / Male Soprano
Mezzo Soprano
SATB
Instrumentation
fl.cl.pf.2vl.vla.vc.db
Duration
C.20 Minutes
Programme Note
December 1927
A basement flat in Fitzroy Square becomes the centre of a scandal that rocks London’s queer community. Bobby Britt, a flamboyant West End dancer, hosts a lively gathering of music, laughter, and other explicit activities. As the night unfolds Bobby performs The Dance of the Seven Veils from Salome for an uninvited mysterious stranger, unaware that the celebration is about to be cut short. Moments later police crash through the door arresting everyone present under charges of keeping a ‘Disorderly House’.
There isn’t much concrete information in the public realm about Bobby Britt, the dancer at the centre of Disorderly House. Most of what we know comes from police records of the 1927 raid on his flat, including a rather forlorn photo of him in his dance skirt, used as evidence against him and his friends.
When we think about the Roaring Twenties, we conjure decadence, excess, and a level of permissiveness. While the upper echelons of society – writers and artists like Christopher Isherwood, Duncan Grant, and Lytton Strachey – enjoyed some freedom, working-class lads like Britt had no such luxury. If caught in an illegal act, respectable life as they knew it was over.
Reading about Bobby’s fate after the raid became the creative drive behind Disorderly House. We wanted to celebrate this daring young man whose performing life was cruelly cut short. His extraordinary longevity – 1900 to 2000 – made him a witness to the queer fight for equality across the twentieth century. Born three years after Havelock Ellis’s study ‘Sexual Inversion’, he lived through the partial legalisation of homosexuality in 1967, the introduction of Clause 28 in 1988, and the lowering of the age of consent to 18 in 1994. Less than four years after his death, civil partnerships were introduced.
This chamber opera introduces Bobby’s life to a contemporary audience while also highlighting how queer people throughout the last century fell victim to the vagaries of British law-making, simply due to when they were born.
Reviews
I liked Jasper Dommett’s Disorderly House, drawing on jazz and Richard Strauss allusions to evoke the 1920s gay scene (the excellent Egor Sergeev doing a wonderfully camp Dance of the Seven Veils), while Jessica Walker, liberally sprinkling Polari slang into her libretto, concocted something between a Joe Orton play and a Round the Horne sketch.
~ ⭐⭐⭐⭐ The Times
Demonstrating an assured touch, Disorderly House by writer Jessica Walker and composer Jasper Dommett. A factually based tale from less enlightened times (1927), it describes one Bobby Britt (Egor Sergeev) holding a party for his queer friends and being arrested on a charge of running a disorderly house – essentially for performing Salome’s Dance of the Seven Veils (as in Wilde’s play and Strauss’s opera) at his own home. There is a moving appearance from Bobby’s older self (Cull), regretting that he subsequently backtracked and live a closeted life; the result is funny, sad and brilliant.
~ ⭐⭐⭐⭐ The Stage
Premiere Details
Librettist
Conductor
Director
Designer
Lighting Designer
Fanny
Stella
Young Man
Beadle / Police Officer / Doctor
Stella's Mum
Low Voice Chorus
Jessica Walker
Michael Rosewell
Bill Banks Jones
Sarah Booth
Colin Eversdijk
Ted Day
Eyra Norman
Simon Mascarenhas-Carter
James Emerson
Anastasia Koorn
Benedict Munden, David Afzelius, Joel Robson, Gabriel Tufail Smith