Flight
Musical America
Pandemic programming has encouraged opera companies to reinvent themselves as TV or movie producers, but few have been as ingenious or as apposite as Seattle Opera with its new film of Jonathan Dove’s
Flight. Written in 1998 by British composer Dove and librettist April De Angelis for Glyndebourne, the work is that rara avis, a contemporary opera that seems to have genuinely entered the repertoire, particularly in English-speaking countries where its quirky humor is most readily appreciated. Its Seattle Opera debut is the first time it has been reimagined for the screen.
Flight takes place over 24 hours in a busy airport terminal governed by an icy, rule-bound controller, a pair of over-sexed flight attendants, and an eagle-eyed immigration officer. Among the passengers are Bill and Tina, a couple hoping to rekindle their sex life on a sun-drenched holiday, a middle-aged woman eager to rendezvous for the first time with her 22-year-old overseas fiancé, and a diplomatic appointee and his heavily pregnant wife en route to Minsk (appropriately known as Minskman and Minskwoman). Into the mix Dove and De Angelis throw a refugee trapped in the terminal building without papers, a character inspired by Mehran Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian refugee who lived in a departure lounge at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport from 1988 until 2006 (the same story that inspired Spielberg’s 2004 movie