All that was missing was the gold, flamingo-feathered throne and the pig. Balls (yes, hilarious title) is Laura Karpman’s opera based on the 1973 Battle of the Sexes tennis match, when the former world No 1 Billie Jean King beat the former US champion Bobby Riggs in three straight sets to win $100,000 and a symbolic victory for women’s sport.
First heard in the US in 2017 (the same year a Hollywood movie came out about the match), Balls arrived at the Royal Festival Hall for the world premiere of its full orchestral version by the Philharmonia. And it was a blast. Ricocheting between helter-skelter, high-energy sequences and reflective passages in a thoroughly entertaining way, Karpman and the librettist Gail Collins’s opera remains true to the match’s theatrical spirit, even if at times its important, deeper message risked tipping into earnest emoting.
• The tennis Battle of the Sexes is now an opera
Still, from the moment the ensemble chorus arrived on stage in tennis whites, stretching and limbering up while a montage of women’s sports played on the video backdrop, it was clear this would be a fun 45 minutes. Performers stalked the aisles, the London Voices brandished placards with slogans such as “Libbers not Lobbers” in the choir stalls, and innuendo-laden adverts gave us a slice of 1970s life. An introductory message from King saluted the evening’s trailblazing conductor Marin Alsop and noted that the music world still has a way to go on gender equality.
Nikola Printz as Billie Jean King
© PHILHARMONIA ORCHESTRA/MARC GASCOIGNE
Karpman’s score is vibrant, lively and genre-blending, at its best during the tennis match itself when she loops tennis ball thwacks to create rhythmic drive, gets the orchestra clapping and sends the percussion section into overdrive. Just before the final showdown, the action cuts away to an interlude, giving a potted history of the fight for women’s votes. Does it lay on the message too thick? Perhaps, but Eve Pearson Maxwell’s performance as the women’s rights activist Susan B Anthony was convincing. And the post-match “moral of the story”, with a dash of “what happened next”, wraps things up in movie style.
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Nicky Spence gave a brilliant turn as the smiling Riggs, the “self-proclaimed chauvinist pig”, sporting a yellow “Sugar Daddy” jacket, Teflon-coated in his belief that women should be in the kitchen rather than on the court. King, in contrast, is focused and introspective, feeling the pressure to be twice as good as any guy, and Nikola Printz soared powerfully and fearlessly in the role. Over a woozy orchestral accompaniment, Lotte Betts-Dean turned on the seductive charm as Marilyn Barnett, the secretary with whom King had a secret relationship.
Before this all-American feast, a slice of pure English eccentricity. Walton’s Façade, with its whimsical wordplay and tongue-twisting verses, put Spence, Printz and Betts-Dean through their enunciation paces, backed by a handful of Philharmonia players. They took on this virtuosic feat and, for the most part, won.
★★★★☆