The first half of Push 04's opera and ballet double bill is this new work by Errollyn Wallen, a companion piece to Earth, seen last year at the Linbury Studio. Set in Houston in 2014, Fire centres on Asante, sung by the Swedish soprano Jacqueline Miura, established in an opening video sequence as a young black Harvard graduate about to join Nasa's first mission to Mars.
Indha Rubasingham's production switches efficiently between scenes of Asante's domestic life and slightly more stylised ones, involving first the chorus voicing Asante's self-doubt and then two female slave ancestors, who bolster her resolve. Then there is a fire at Asante's house. Rushing in to save her boyfriend, she encounters a third ancestor, a tribal warrior who effectively resurrects her and sends her back to join the mission.
The story is Wallen's own, and she has set it to a score, played with polish and conducted by Philip Headlam, that is atmospheric rather than challenging: basically minimalist, but using a rich tonal palette. Yet despite the work's brevity and the simple, slick production, Fire comes across as chaotic.
There is far too much simultaneous singing for the story to be clearly told; the words come over directly only in Asante's exchanges with her boyfriend, Pau Luto, and in her aria-like episodes, the last of which is based, too obviously not to sound incongruous, on the closing aria of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. Moreover, though Miura has presence, her soprano can sound small in this unsympathetic venue. The only singer who consistently makes the required impact is Ronald Samm as Asante's flustered father, though Rodney Clarke's Pau Luto isn't far off.
Push is achieving a good deal with its efforts to provide a mainstream British platform for black artists - not least attracting a London audience that actually looks like an audience from London rather than Frinton-on-Sea. But Another America: Fire draws, unsurprisingly, on American experience rather than British. Maybe the operatic content of Push 05 could usefully be brought closer to home.
· Ends tonight. Box office: 0870 737 7737.
