THE SINGER

THE LOCKDOWN MONOLOGUES

THE SINGER

BY / TOM HOLLOWAY

We see the OPERA SINGER.

She’s weaving something from a handful of long dry grass. It’s hard to see what.

I’d just moved to Freiburg to join the company on a two-year contract and so I’d got to town, found somewhere to live and leapt on into rehearsals for a couple of big chorus works.

Normally you don’t think twice about spending your days in a big old rehearsal room with fifty or sixty other people or having lunch in the canteen with them and the other eighty-odd from the orchestra, or even being in the theatre at night… Fifteen hundred in the audience… The orchestra in the pit… Stage filled with my new singing buddies… then backstage, maybe another twenty or thirty crew…

She weaves a particularly difficult bit, and then keeps going.

Eventually the news got out about the virus and then a few people were turning up with the sniffles and then the company thought one or two tests should probably be done and before you knew it, it was right there, in our corridors, and all around our grand house, and…

Well…

Before I knew it I had the sniffles too.

There was a lot of nittering and nattering at the house, so I just took myself off to the doctors and did the test myself, and, of course, you guessed it.

She stops weaving for a second and breathes in and then breathes out.

I like working. Being busy. Working hard. One of my favourite things about working in opera is the need to be at it all the time, day and night, performance after performance, making sure each evening is as good as the last… Each show is as strong as the one you did yesterday… There’s a kind of meditation to it all, sure, but it’s also just a whole lot of hard work and I like having to do a whole lot of hard work.

I guess I was a bit annoyed at my test result, you see… I’d just moved to this town ready to hit the ground hard and then I was kinda suddenly in lockdown in my new tiny apartment with nothing to do.

I was wanting to sing. I needed to keep practising, at least, and I was calling the rehearsal director day after day… Give me more music… Send me more scores… Let me use this time… Help me keep working… But what I was told to do, what the doctor told me and what Freiburg ended up telling me, was just lie down and rest a while.

That’s it.

Lie there.

Someone like me…

And they were right, of course. You can’t sing when your lungs are infected… You can’t perform if you can’t breathe right… And I mean I didn’t want to die from the thing. I’m young and healthy, so it was unlikely to do me much harm, but if I pushed myself too much or put too much strain on my pulmonary system, then

really who knew what might’ve happened. How would that be? Some tragic opera singer dying alone of 21st century consumption in a tiny apartment in a tiny German city?!

It’s an odd kind of sensation for a singer to lie there and feel this thing in your lungs and to picture what it must look like in there when you’re used to imagining it pure and clear and strong and resonant. Knowing that it is… I don’t know… Rotten. Rotting. Yeah, I didn’t like lying there so much.

I talked to my priests through zoom… My old family one and my new German one. My friends from church back home too and my new friends there in Germany too…

There was also this nice man from the opera, the pianist. He would drop food boxes around at my door and we’d talk through the keyhole for an hour or two, just sitting on the ground and talking together about music. About life. About how great it is to be surrounded by people and music and, for folks like us, God too.

I read books as well. Scores… Librettos… Music… I listened to music. Listened to podcasts. Listened to the radio. Listened to sermons… Philosophical programs… Poetry… All of it. Why not, right? It’s all humans grappling with being humans, after all.

And so, I thought a lot. About us. About who we are. Or more about why we gather like we do. Why we want to be around so many of our fellow homo sapien sapiens… Why we make things for each other. Make art, sure, but also just make… things. To share.

We all work together and play together and live together and create together and although it doesn’t always feel like it, the world hasn’t ever been as together as it’s come to be right now, and the speed the virus spread has made that more clear than anything else really could have. We are billions working as one in a beautiful, conflicted kind of polyharmony.

My church… I’m Greek Orthodox. I mean I’m not Greek and my family’s not Greek, but then my dad got reading about the Greek church and he just packed us all up and off we went to this whole other way of communicating with God. Or with each other, if you’re not too keen on the idea of God. It’s all the same to me.

Anyway, in Greek there is this word that’s come to mean ‘person’. Prósopo, but it also means… I don’t know… Face-to-face. Something like that. So, the word for one person actually means two people facing each other.

She’s been weaving throughout and now holds up the figure which looks like two people doing just that.

Look, when all this is over, and everything is up and running again in whatever kind of world has grown out of this… Take yourself off to a service or a concert or game or whatever you want. Just sit at it, shoulder to shoulder, with a few friends or strangers and let the music or the action wash over you.

She does.

Then, while you’re doing it, do something really radical… Stop looking straight ahead for a second and look around either side of you. No one ever looks at the crowd at these things, but they should, because they’d see something really special…

They’d see a sea of faces and in those faces they’d see how we can be one and many all at the same time and it’s bloody beautiful.

She holds the woven figures right up to the camera, turning it around a few times to show off all its sides.

She smiles.

She winks.

She goes.