When a new opera receives 85 productions in 25 years you know it must be something extraordinary. So all eyes were on the Coliseum last night for the British premiere of librettist Terence McNally\u2019s and composer Jake Heggie\u2019s Dead Man Walking. The true story of a Louisiana nun who befriends an inmate on death row and accompanies him to the final lethal injection\u00a0was made famous in the 1995 film starring Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon. In this operatic version, performed by English National Opera, it packs an even bigger emotional punch.<\/p>\n
First, we are forced to witness the crime that led to Joseph de Rocher\u2019s incarceration: the unspeakable rape and murder of a young girl and her boyfriend as they\u2019re obliviously making love in their car in the dead of night. The indifferent car radio, the orchestral shrieks, the girl\u2019s screams, the lurid half-lighting all combined in the most shocking spectacle I\u2019ve ever seen on the operatic stage.<\/p>\n
You could call this sensationalist, but it has a dramatic purpose; to make us withhold sympathy from de Rocher when we meet him later in prison, and question the wisdom of Sister Helen, so fixated on saving his soul, and not much concerned with the sufferings of the parents, who are outraged by this.<\/p>\n
Michael Mayes as Joseph De Rocher, Christine Rice as Sister Helen – Alastair Muir<\/p>\n
It says much for the subtlety of the music, the text and Annilese Miskimmon\u2019s direction that these moral ambiguities register so clearly, even though they\u2019re uttered in the plain language and song of ordinary people who are hurt and bewildered. Their stammerings are given shape by Heggie\u2019s amalgam of Copland-like American pastoral, pinched Britten-esque harmonic tension and open-hearted Americana, including hymns, blues and jazz.<\/p>\n
Christine Rice as Sister Helen is feisty, funny and refreshingly unpreachy, while Michael Mayes gives a towering performance as de Rocher, pacing around like a caged animal as he insists on his own innocence \u2013 while the nervous tic in his right knee tells us he knows he\u2019s lying.<\/p>\n
Dead Man Walking, performed by English National Opera – Alastair Muir<\/p>\n
With 22 roles, including parents, pastors, prisoners, police officers and nuns, plus the genuinely frightening chorus of death-row prisoners, and Finchley Children\u2019s Music Group as the \u2018lost children\u2019 helped by the nuns, it\u2019s impossible to praise everyone, much as they all deserve it. But I can\u2019t resist mentioning the heart-breaking sorrow of Sarah Connolly as de Rocher\u2019s mother, and South African baritone Jacques Imbrailo, who expresses a world of torment as the father of the murdered girl.<\/p>\n
Two quibbles; the orchestra under the over-eager baton of Kerem Hasan sometimes overwhelmed the singers, and designer Alex Eales\u2019s single set, which does duty for both the convent and the prison, was relentlessly charmless. Surely those nuns would have had a bit of Louisiana honeysuckle to gladden the eye? That aside the production is a triumph which reminds anyone who needs reminding that ENO is a precious cultural asset, which we should cherish.<\/p>\n
Dead Man Walking is at the Coliseum, London until 18 November<\/p>\n