Elton John, Pet Shop Boys, and Rufus Wainwright have all graced the spectacular main theatre, white and gold with crimson seats and a deep blue oculus that mimics the night sky. Below ground meanwhile, in the ROH’s Linbury Theatre, things have been allowed to get a bit more edgy and odd, like a laboratory of sorts. John Grant, Caroline Polacheck, Matthew Herbert, and the late Scott Walker have been involved in various commissions at the Linbury, plus, more recently, ESKA made a splash with her binaural opera .
This autumn, associate director Netia Jones is bringing a whole new series of research and development events to the Linbury, called Dark Nights, with the idea of creating one-off performances by vocal artists and composers at the vanguard of experimentation – kicking off on September 23 with Keeley Forsyth who has, over the course of three albums and a handful of EPs, carved out an impressive niche as one of the UK’s most distinctive voices, spine-tinglingly deep and with a very physical vibrato.
In , her new work for Dark Nights, the Harrogate-based actor and musician is expanding on her Matthew Bourne collaboration Hand to Mouth from last year, transforming it into a multi-layered theatre piece through projections and a new spoken-word element based on new work by The Son of Man author Jean-Baptiste Del Amo.
“We’ve done something very bespoke,” she says. “When I’m on stage I often mutter things to myself so I thought, what if I actually said words that were written by an incredible writer. Jean-Baptiste had written that he’d been listening to my first album while he was writing The Son of Man, so we got in touch to see if he would be interested. So he has written seven chapters for this new show, and it’s a story that has a beginning, a middle, and an end.”
Called The No-End House, the story describes a brother and sister reaching back through memories of their childhood and the home they grew up in, as told from the sister’s point of view, through Forsyth’s narration. “You get a feeling that their father has just died, and that their mother died a long time ago, and it reaches back into all these memories of abuse and connection,” she says. “It's very stark. We premiered a version of the piece at BRDCST festival earlier this year that played a lot with lighting, but this is something very bespoke.”
As an unusual singer herself, Forsyth says she’s naturally drawn to other voices with “a kind of cavity and resonance.” “I like it when I feel that the voice isn't just coming from the vocal cords,” she says. “I think it was Eartha Kitt who said that she was ‘of the dirt,’ and that's the kind of voice I like.”
“That’s probably why I was drawn to opera singing as a teenager,” she adds. “Although I never got to see an opera as a kid, I really, really loved the vibrato. I would hum to myself all the time, and it gave me a very comforting feeling in my body.”
Looking at her choices for the songs that have defined her life, Forsyth’s interest in a wide range of voices is clear, from soprano Dawn Upshaw to Scott Walker, via Karen Carpenter, Karen Dalton, and Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser. “Although I’m most drawn to female voices, I never actually see them in a female form, because a voice can be anything and I think about that a lot,” she says. “I think I do push what a female voice can do rather than keep it in a kind of sensitive and breathy place. I like singers who are very strong.”