and the Crowd (wept), Tete a Tete/Riverside Studios, review Do you remember Jade Goody? After all, she died four years ago, and that's an aeon in terms of reality television. So let me remind you that she was the pathetically ignorant but good-natured creature with a sweet piggy nose, elevated by the alchemy of Big Brother and crowned queen of nonentity celebrities before fate cruelly cursed her with a fatal cancer, poor child. Now she has joined Jackie Onassis, Anna Nicole Smith and Princess Diana in the constellation of female icons who have been transfigured into operatic heroines - or rather, she is a candidate for this sort of immortality, as composer Erick Flores and librettist Asfaneh Gray are still developing their portrait, and what they offered on the opening night of Tete a Tete's festival of works-in-progress was only a sneak provisional preview. With a duration just shy of an hour, its dramatic format falls somewhere between a requiem mass and an oratorio: in the manner of Bach's Evangelist, a baritone narrator reads out the tale of Jade's deprived and depraved childhood, her shenanigans on the telly (including the "racist" poppadam gaffe), her love for her sons and the feckless Jack Tweed, the dignified via dolorosa of her dying days. Three female singers singly and chorically embody and reflect on Jade (whose name is never specifically mentioned), as well as playing subsidiary characters who follow the saga through the lens of trash such as Heat and OK!. Sometimes the net effect is a bit of a mess, not least because Gray relies excessively on the cliché of sopranos" singing hysterically in a very high register at which words are incommunicable, but the treatment is not cheaply sensationalist or cruelly exploitative: there are proper amounts of compassion and disgust here, and an intelligent awareness of the ironies involved. The music is richly orchestrated for a band of nine and opens with a Gothickly grim and portentous overture in which taped birds flap their wings, doors creak and wordless coloratura floats over keening wind and thumping timpani. The rest of the score could benefit from shaping, refining and clarifying, and the musical idiom is too abrasive for it to hold any sort of commercial potential. But one's attention is held. Pia Furtado directs a rudimentary staging, Adam Gatehouse conducts an excellent band. The singers were admirably undaunted by the sweltering humidity: the wretched Jade was not dishonoured. Until August 2. Tickets:020 8237 1111; www.tete-a-tete.org.uk