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Love Counts An opera for two voices
Directed by Lindsay Posner I live in Brixton. I was raised here. After school hours, I went to a local boxing gym. One of the trainers was a retired fighter. A good tough trainer, but there was something wrong withhim. He couldn’t write his own name, and he lived in a ramshackle converted hut at the back of gardens. There was electricity but not much else. I didn’t understand at the time. He had been there since the end of the 1945 war. Not quite a tramp, but definitely a loner, who clearly found it difficult to live in the new post-war world. The word was – he kept all his money under the floor. Neighbours said he couldn’t read numbers on a bus. He had to ask the driver for the number. Other neighbours smiled sadly – he kept to himself, few friends, liked to talk to foxes in the railway copse behind his makeshift home. In the gym, I was not a very promising welterweight (140lbs), bit of a miserable left-handed counter puncher, but I got on well with the old fighter. This was the origin of the story behind the opera LOVE COUNTS. He baked potatoes in a coke stove and talked to me about the great British fighter Tommy Burns. Michael Nyman and myself had a really surprising leap into opera last year when I wrote the libretto for Michael’s vivid score for MAN AND BOY:DADA, which was performed at theALMEIDA Opera Season. It has since had a number of productions in Germany, Austria,Czechoslovakia, Italy and America, and has recently been released as a CD. So I put it to Michael that we might try another opera. I suggested the story of the punched out fighter. And Michael agreed to explore the story with me.Michael’s response was immediate because he is very interested in numbers. In the magic and mystery of the numerical world. And there was another side to the story of the tired fighterI knew. He had brain damage. The cerebral cortex had been battered in the ring. And blame could be laid on his own ability. He was a light puncher and it meant he went sixteen rounds often taking an unusual number of shots to the head. But he rarely went down. He stayed on his feet. And that became his own tragedy. Later on, after I gave up the gym, I heard he had been approached by a medical team who used numbers to help crash victims to regain their senses. Although he sounded like a difficult case to take on, the numbers and basic math puzzles did a great deal for him. He could identify bank notes, read bus numbers, sign his own name, even learn to count. I suggest it was the idea of the use of numbers to reconstruct natural human recognitions which intrigued Michael Nyman. And although LOVE COUNTS is a two-hander about a punched out fighter and a very reserved woman who is a professor of mathematics – it is also a story of love and rescue between two people who in normal circumstances would never have met. As a working playwright, it means a great deal to me to put quite opposite characters on the stage. Yes, they share common human stock, but thrown together they can break out new understandings. My old fighter is confronted by a woman who lectures mathematics at University College. My old fighter is a gentle soul who keeps violence strictly to his vocation. She, in turn, has been married to a man who was physically brutal to her. She wants to rescue the old fighter from his ignorant battered state, but she finds it hard toaccept this man is innately a gentle creature. She cannot to trust herself with the fighter on a personal note. And yet, she becomes so close to him, she finds she is drawn deeply to him. I suggest the opera LOVE COUNTS is about trust and rescue. The old fighter may not fully grasp it, but he has also rescued something in her fragile heart. |
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