When the director Graham Vick died in 2021, one feared for the future of Birmingham Opera Company, the community-based organisation with which he had created such memorable music theatre over more than 20 years. But BOC is carrying on, following Vick’s all-inclusive principles, and the first production of its new era is Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler’s agit-prop cantata Die Massnahme, which in John Willett’s English translation becomes The Decision. Directed by Anthony Almeida, it’s staged in one of the shabby post-industrial spaces that seem to abound in Birmingham, and which BOC seem able to find so unfailingly.
Written in 1930, The Decision tells the story of four agitators who are dispatched from Soviet Russia to foment revolution in pre-communist China. En route they meet a young sympathiser who offers to be their guide, but when they return to Moscow, they confess that they were forced to execute him when his enthusiasm threatened their mission; in recounting their story they ask whether their brutal actions were justified. The central committee (the chorus) determines that the agitators had made the right decision, and that as a result they had been able to spread Marxist teaching and the “ABC of Communism”.
