At least two facts stare us unflinchingly in the face here. For all the programme’s harping on how “everyone has their own view about the death penalty,” I don’t think there was any doubt in the audience’s mind about the horror of its Old Testament vengeance. And I also doubt if anyone was ultimately left unmoved or stunned by the hard-hitting performances of a perfect cast. This is music-theatre at its riveting best.
Jake Heggie’s work, premiered 25 years ago and staged 80 times around the world to date, isn’t perfect. It starts with a haunting, lopsided flow not a million miles away from the opening of Britten’s Billy Budd – Sister Helen Prejean, the real-life nun who visited prisoners on Death Row, and the moral centre of that drama at sea, Captain Vere, are often unsure in their truth - and wherever that uneasy, sad music is adapted, the focus is strong. But Heggie also goes for a lot of big gestures – discordant brass, thwacking timpani for the obvious bouts of violence, an overwrought Act One nightmare curtain, the occasional overscoring – while his use of hymns and spirituals has varying levels of effectiveness. Kerem Hasan and the English National Opera Orchestra handle it all sensitively.
What pulls the music back from excess sentimentality, even banality, is the concrete sense of Terence McNally’s resonant libretto. In the second scene of Act Two, a sleepless Prejean meets the concern and advice of her best friend,Sister Rose. The voices briefly join in soaring duet. But Christine Rice and Madeline Boreham (pictured above) point the text and are directed by Annilese Miskimmon, in what’s easily the best production of her mixed ENO reign, to use telling and real gestures. It speaks volumes for Rice’s painfully human voice of compassion that we instantly know who she is, feel for her moral confusion when all she can respond to the parents of the teenage couple her charge brutally murdered is “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry”.
The crux of the opera is the series of meetings at the Angola State Penitentiary, Louisiana, between Prejean and the murderer, Joseph De Rocher, an amalgamation of two men in her real-life memoirs. Heggie is sure-footed in the sudden turns and shocks of the scenes; Michael Mayes as De Rocher comes as close to the edge in his fearsome intensity as any singing actor I’ve ever encountered, his changes of mood painstakingly registered in Rice’s reaction. You believe everything here, above all the superficially incomprehensible refusal of the killer to admit to his guilt, which means giving up what little agency he has. His soliloquy at the start of Act Two turns the screw to an almost unbearable degree; it’s as dedicated and no-holds-barred performance as any I’ve seen on a stage. When grace comes, it's mesmerising.
The emotional stakes are also raised by Sarah Connolly, unrecognisable as Joseph’s mother (pictured above with Mayes). Unlike Prejean, she won’t push for the truth, but expresses her feelings in simple language that can’t fail to touch. The moment where Joseph breaks down in the family photograph is the first to turn the soul upside down; more quickly follow. Other outstanding performances come from Ronald Samm, as the far from sympathetic prison Father, leading a Lord’s Prayer that is pure threat; and from Jacques Imbrailo as the one among the four parents who admits that De Rocher’s death by lethal injection won’t bring closure.
No-one else in a surprisingly large cast with telling cameos puts a foot wrong. The end is as spare as the countdown in John Adams’s Doctor Atomic: Rice’s Prejean outside the clinical execution chamber as the face of love, which is what her God is all about, fixed on by the dying man as his heartbeat finally gives out. And then her simple hymn,”He will gather us all around”, unaccompanied. It must be the most difficult thing in the world to sing, but Rice’s control as a truly great mezzo means she carries it off
Alex Eales’ set and D. M. Woods’ lighting inform Miskimmon’s unsensationalised production. What a pity that even the stalls weren’t full, the upper levels of the Coliseum closed off. Maybe people felt a prison drama ending (or nearly ending) in an execution would be too much. You can bear it; see it at all costs.
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