Industrial arias

Nov 19 2010 By Lorne Jackson

Lorne Jackson finds a Stravinsky opera taking shape in a harsh Jewellery Quarter warehouse.

I haven’t got a clue how I’m meant to get to the AE Harris building.

Which is why I’ve taken the smart option and hopped in a cab.

Unfortunately the taxi driver doesn’t have a clue how to get to the AE Harris building, either.

For a while we trundle down side streets and inch up dead ends with all the planning and purpose of a ballbearing let loose in a pinball machine.

Eventually the taxi driver breaks to a halt, twists round in his seat, then, with a note of triumph in his voice, like Stanley introducing himself to Dr Livingstone, declares: “Northland Street!”

“Um, no,” I answer, studying the information I printed from the Internet earlier that day. “It’s meant to be on Northwood Street. Northwood.”

The cabbie sighs, turns back to the wheel, and we set off, once more, into the pinball puzzle that is the back streets of Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter.

Eventually we find Northwood Street, though still no glimpse of the near mythical AE Harris building.

I continue my quest on foot.

Inquiring in a shop, I’m met with a blank look from the girl behind the counter. It’s past six O’clock now, dark, and the empty road I’m pacing is overshadowed by gloomy Victorian warehouses.

The kind of place a mugging could take place. A dead-end road where the only way to stop yourself being manhandled and robbed is to be the one doing the manhandling and robbing.

Just then I hear a sound. A human voice, screaming.

No, not screaming. There’s tune beneath the tremor.

Which means I’m here at last – the AE Harris building. Yet another ancient warehouse, though at the moment it’s been turned into something else.

Something grander.

It’s the current home of the Birmingham Opera Company.

Opera is arguably the most lavish of the performing arts.

The stereotypical view of a night at the opera is when an audience of plump cheque books gets together to watch some chubby performers warble for a fat fee.

That has never been the Birmingham Opera Company’s way. Almost perversely, they seek out the least salubrious of locations.

They delve into the dingy. Create romance from rubble.

Introduce silky sounds to crude corners of the city that are normally so blank and bereft of culture that even wised-up taxi drivers lose their way attempting to find the location.

Since 2001, when the company was born out of the ashes of the City of Birmingham Touring Opera, they have presented Berg’s Votzek in a dilapidated warehouse on the edge of the Ladywood housing estate, Beethoven’s Fidelio in a big top pitched in Aston Park, near the Villa ground, and Bernstein’s Candide in an old car parts factory in Digbeth.

Now they have taken over the AE Harris building in the Jewellery Quarter, which is where I find members of the company preparing to rehears their latest production, Igor Stravinsky’s The Wedding.