It’s amazing, really, that anybody goes to contemporary opera — the most niche of all niche pursuits; the only reliable prospects would seem to be a lot of rather unpleasant music, jagged and baffling vocal lines, unintelligible words, grim little stories and rigorously bare-bones productions… It must appeal to some self-punishing urge elsewhere catered to by religion, marital sex, driving in London and so on. So, it would be silly to complain too much about the masses of unsold seats for this first professional staged UK performance of the century’s most successful opera: there are really so many reasons not to go…
But Jake Heggie’s work (scripted by Terence McNally), with at least 25 productions to date, is an unusual example of the genre — at least it seems so to us in Europe. It is the cheerleader for a new sort of American opera that I have written about in the November issue of The Critic, which tends to be based on well-known pieces in another form. Heggie himself has written successful adaptations of Moby Dick and It’s a Wonderful Life!. Being American, the music doesn’t legally have to be horrible and modernist, unlike here, where our composers are nearly all still in thrall to the more basically disastrous idioms of the post-Schoenberg world. What Heggie’s music is is another matter: an indefinable mishmash of something that sounds like a high-end new-Hollywood soundtrack with bits and bobs of everything from Puccini to Rodgers (and more modern “Musical” idioms), with eruptions of rock and soul and boogie and blues — but put together with real deftness and somehow sounding absolutely organic. It is sonorously scored for a forceful orchestra, but it’s far from simplistic, with a lot of rhythmic intricacy. There’s really a kind of genius in this music, a sophistication that is of an entirely different and no doubt lower order from that of someone like Harrison Birtwistle — but also undoubtedly much less ghastly to listen to. And in the same way that it certainly sounds like music, the rather sumptuous vocal lines sound like song — until you try to hum one, and find that it’s impossible, there’s really nothing there.
Well, opera has never had to be the greatest music: the only absolute requirement in this odd art form is that it should work — and Dead Man Walking really does that. Even if for large tracts you’re hardly even aware of the music (it becomes the background against or medium within which things happen), it reasserts itself periodically with undeniable power and persuasiveness, without ever really reaching the status of “song” or “aria”, and this again is a cute piece of judgment: that sort of musical event must inevitably be artificial and distancing, and the whole point of Dead Man Walking is to avoid distancing, to drag the audience very quickly into the drama of the nun Sister Helen and the murderer Joe De Rocher, and not to let you go or relax at any point.
The story itself is based on the memoirs of Sister Helen Préjean and is best known through the Tim Robbins film with Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn. And there is a filmic, almost documentary feel to the opera, though McNally’s expert libretto fillets, expands, highlights and dwells in a highly cunning manner that again never feels artificial, though of course it really is. Opera’s superpowers — the soliloquy aria, the duet, the ensemble — are fully exploited. It’s not just the nun and the killer: we also get the Order’s home-base work with kids from the projects, the prison governor and chaplain, most importantly the families of the slaughtered teenage lovers and of Joseph — plus the initial crime, in unsparing detail, and the final execution, ditto. The scenes are interleaved, seamlessly and without a break, the drama absolutely compelling and paced.
And it’s no kind of horror-porn, as it so easily could be: the terror and inherent violence of everything — and especially Death Row — is conveyed without any hysteria; even the prison goons have moments of humanity. It’s quite far, in its unshowy intensity, from films like Shawshank and The Green Mile, with which there are superficial similarities. In fact the opera’s avoidance of the obvious perils is one of its best qualities. There are occasional hair-raising moments of stuff like bravely smiling nuns and gospel-singing moppets, but Annilese Miskimmon’s admirable production subtly de-sweetens this for local tastes, which also has the effect of raising the contribution of Sister Rose (radiantly sung by Madeline Boreham, from ENO’s young singers’ programme) to its proper prominence.
Because the story is as much Helen’s spiritual journey as Joseph’s. Certainly the main thrust is her attempt to strong-arm him to salvation, in the face of his intransigent refusal to admit his guilt, and the angry and baffled opposition of the families, who wonder why she isn’t comforting them. She is properly tormented, until Rose points out that in order to become a fit conduit for the grace she yearns to deliver to Joseph, Helen herself needs to find a way of forgiving him. (I suppose a good deal of the public resistance to seeing this show is based on a kind of cowardly snobbery about such concepts, and the Christian religion in general, that seems quite widespread among the arts-consuming sector. But just because Helen and the nuns believe this doesn’t mean we have to: there can of course be redemption without God, even if it is of a different order, and the human effects – again, not just on Joseph but on the bereaved families – are basically the same.
It is a powerful and compelling evening, a serious story treated with proper seriousness, but not earnest, even with moments of humour and light amid the gloom. ENO’s publicity goes on a lot about how it should make us think about the death sentence, but I am not convinced at all by that. Opera has never lowered its aims so far as to be “thought-provoking”: leave such tiresome things to the theatre. Opera can reveal emotional and spiritual truths, glimpses into the human heart, in a unique way – no doubt because of how music raises it above the literal, transforms the everyday into a series of epiphanies, forces the characters to bare their souls: effectively what Helen is trying to make Joseph do.
Opera has always majored in the idea that we are all on Death Row
Dead Man Walking has often benefited from having very high-tab singers — Joyce DiDonato, Susan Graham — and here our home-grown mezzo star Christine Rice does it: she’s always been a magnetic stage creature, the voice is as rich as ever, and there is real power in her projection of frailty (and the slow growth of inner strength), a vulnerable ageing woman in an atrociously masculine milieu. Michael Mayes has sung the role a lot and has the mixture of fury, aggression and fear down pretty well, and they connect strongly. As noted, Annilese Miskimmon’s direction is understated but (as usual with her) very thoughtful: when strange, theatrical things happen — very rarely — they have huge impact, as when the pair collapse to the ground, like a couple in a Baroque opera crushed by the weight of the world. The quartet of parents convey the hopeless anger and pain without histrionics, and Sarah Connolly does the hard role of Joe’s trailer-park mum, tormented, decent, struggling to articulate impossible things.
Well, I don’t know, maybe Heggie really has invented a new kind of opera. You can have all kinds of reservations about the musical means but the effect is certainly far more ambitious than that of any actual musical. It’s not Mozart, it’s not Janacek, but it’s definitely in the family: and opera has always majored in the idea that we are all on Death Row. This is not really like anything you will have seen in the theatre, and I bet there are some very cheap tickets going, if you look around.
Dead Men Walking runs until November 18
