‘Link in my bio’ brings opera firmly into the 21st century

Bringing opera firmly into the 21st century, Link in my bio is an interactive and all-consuming story of tragedy on a South London bus.

Mixing grime and jazz with classical opera in a modern tale of the rise of neo-fascism, the audience decides what happens next at several points in the show via a QR code that the audience is asked to scan upon arrival.

We take our seats in the studio at the Grand Théâtre, before a stage set with tiered benches, a representation of the upper deck of a London bus. To the left are the musicians – piano, violin, cello, clarinet and percussion from the United Instruments of Lucilin, a Luxembourg ensemble.

In the background, a large screen shows the bus route from the driver’s view of the streets of south London. This is a bustling yet diverse neighbourhood, filled with different languages and voices, different ethnicities and religions.

Immersive and consuming

On Valentine’s day, this quiet bus stop is besieged by school children in blazers. The audience is literally surrounded by them, as they populate the aisles and even the ceiling level passageway normally used by those setting up the stage lights.

It’s noisy with chatter, music, the sounds of market stall holders shouting and the constant beep, beep of people using their Oyster cards to pay for their transport.

There’s the gamers, the wannabe roadmen, and the black boy who was bright enough to get a scholarship to the posh local school. All races and classes are side by side on this bus, even refugees who faced a perilous journey crossing the Channel so they could dine on the ubiquitous chicken and chips sold in shops across suburbs.

Everyone is on their phone. Watching make-up tutorials, listening to music, playing survival shooter games, posting messages to save local community markets, and watching podcasts made by neo-fascists.

This is post-Brexit Britain, and a younger generation who say “F you EU”. This is a South London that is being slowly gentrified. Family businesses are being replaced by bougie cafes and plant-lending libraries. This is a South London where you are asked to relocate because your council home is being demolished to build a shiny new block of flats for a host of middle-class city commuters.

South London’s diversity also underpins tensions just below the surface  © Photo credit: Alfonso Salgueiro Lora

This is post-Brexit Britain, and a younger generation who say “F you EU”. This is a South London that is being slowly gentrified. Family businesses are being replaced by bougie cafes and plant-lending libraries. This is a South London where you are asked to relocate because your council home is being demolished to build a shiny new block of flats for a host of middle-class city commuters.

In the background we see the podcaster spewing out hate against refugees and inciting violence. We hear the voices of the woman who is late for work, and the men who want to rise up and reclaim the bus, and the streets of the city for themselves.

Grime, opera and jazz

Director Seta White worked with writer Jennifer Farmer and with real school children in South London to ensure that the dialogue that is sung mostly in operatic form, but also spoken, chanted and even rapped, is very real.

It’s peppered with swear words, abbreviations, and the popular phrases we all see on memes (also shown in the backdrop), because this is both an online yet very three dimensional world for today’s youth.

The music, from librettos created by Charlotte Marlow, melt seamlessly into the grime, drum ‘n’ bass, jazz and classical music of Dirty Freud. This is operatic fusion and it somehow surprisingly works brilliantly.

The young tenors, mezzos, baritones and sopranos have amazing voices, and move so effortlessly between singing and speaking, whilst the clarinet and saxophone player represent the voices of parents and teachers.

In the first half the creators draw the audience into the spellbinding world of this diverse group. In the second half, the bus is hijacked by alt and far right radicals.

As the theatre programme states: “Ideologies, identities and loyalties collide as the passengers are confronted with the growing violence on their doorstep. In their schools. On their airways.”

“Ideologies, identities and loyalties collide” said director Seta White  © Photo credit: Alfonso Salgueiro Lora

As the theatre programme states: “Ideologies, identities and loyalties collide as the passengers are confronted with the growing violence on their doorstep. In their schools. On their airways.”

All the while the backdrop on stage is a screen filled with shooter games, or the video podcast of a neo-fascist inciting violence, until it reaches a crescendo in a brutal act.

The audience gets to decide what a character might do at a critical stage in the performance, but at the world premiere of Link in my bio, only half the audience is participating – mostly the younger half.

In the director’s note in the programme, White talks about the “rise of the alt- and far-right, the insidious methods they use to build traction, and the threatening impact they are having on young people today, in particular young people from diverse backgrounds as we have in our story.”

This might be a South London, post-Brexit tale, but it is surely mirrored in cities across Europe. What White, Farmer, Marlow and Dirty Freud have achieved is therefore a truly remarkable opera for our times.

Link in my bio plays again on 8 December at 20:00 with tickets still available.