Years earlier than Elisabeth Moss first placed on Offred’s purple kirtle and glowered on the digital camera from beneath a white visor, years earlier than the TV sequence took Margaret Atwood’s guide approach past its ending, there was The Handmaid’s Story: the opera, by the composer Poul Ruders and librettist Paul Bentley. It was premiered in Copenhagen in 2000 and staged at English Nationwide Opera three years later. Now, barely revised by its authors – and, after Trump and 6 January, seeming extra urgently related than ever - it’s again in a brand new staging, the primary opera directed right here by Annilese Miskimmon since she turned ENO’s creative director.
We're at a symposium listening to a newly found cassette tape, an artefact from Gilead, offered by a tutorial performed by the actor Camille Cottin. Offred’s voice speaks to us first via the tape, sounding as delicate and distant as outdated shellac information – after which Kate Lindsey takes over in particular person, starting a magnetic central efficiency wherein it’s her voice, with its beautifully managed mixture of sweetness and substance, that reveals as a lot as her actions.
The complete horror of her state of affairs takes time to be revealed, maybe too lengthy: the Commander doesn’t flip up on stage for almost an hour, and the executions wherein each handmaid have to be complicit occur solely in the direction of the top. The Wall shows pictures of the useless, not their hanging our bodies. But there's refined menace in the best way the characters transfer in regimented traces in entrance of the lengthy conference-centre curtains of Annemarie Woods’s set – and, certainly, all through Ruders’s evocative rating, vibrantly performed by the ENO orchestra carried out by Joana Carneiro. Excessive, chiming percussion provides a sheen of artificiality, and borrowings from different kinds throw up transient associations: there’s a wrenching use of Bach in one in all many flashbacks involving Offred’s little daughter. She’s performed by the real-life daughter of Rhian Lois, who as Janine is a part of a powerful supporting solid together with Avery Amereau, Pumeza Matshikiza, Susan Bickley and others.
Regardless of Carneiro’s care, and regardless that Ruders has reportedly scaled again a number of the scoring for the reason that premiere, there are nonetheless passages that appear merely noisy, together with a lot of the music for Aunt Lydia, which, regardless of a tour de drive efficiency from Emma Bell, is pitched so excessive the surtitles are important if you wish to perceive the phrases. The best moments are sometimes the quietest, particularly Offred’s intricate duet along with her recorded former self – one in all many grainy video flashbacks projected onto the curtains in a approach that implies The Time Earlier than is concurrently light-years away and shut sufficient to the touch.
A lot was manufactured from the truth that there was an all-female manufacturing workforce, with some two dozen feminine staffers taking a bow on the first-night curtain name. However whereas this opera tells a girl’s story ostensibly from a girl’s perspective, it’s not the feminist name to arms that the TV sequence had time and area to grow to be: issues occur to Offred, not due to her. If ENO desires to stage an actual feminist opera it must look additional, to more moderen works, however that is at the very least a step in the suitable route.
Till Thursday at Coliseum, London
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