Dramas of life and death
I.
The director Katie Mitchell made news in October when she announced that she was leaving the world of opera because it was so misogynistic. I’d like to hear more on this: do other women directors find the world of opera more inclined to misogyny than theatre? Mitchell herself was a controversial figure before she ever moved to opera - in 2007, Nicholas Hytner, then artistic director of the National Theatre, said “I know that Katie Mitchell gets misogynistic reviews, where everything they <the male critics> say is predicated on her sex. Gay males have never had a problem in the theatre . . . The ones who have it worst are the gay women. They really get it in the neck and there’s a lot of sniggering.”
Yet I’d say the Mitchell problem went deeper than Hytner then claimed, and deeper than gender: I knew feminists (female ones) who heartily detested Mitchell’s work before 2007 - and in 2022, when I admired her Covent Garden staging of Handel’s “Theodora”, I heard voices of strong disagreement from people of a wide spectrum of gender, sexuality, and politics. Still, opera without Mitchell will surely be a smaller-minded and more primly conservative genre.
That said, her modern-dress staging of Janáček’s “The Makropoulos Case”, new at Covent Garden on Tuesday 4 November and in repertory until November 21, is not how I shall want to remember either Mitchell or this fascinating and absorbing opera. There were some boos on Tuesday, yet booing isn’t quite the appropriate response to the clever inventiveness of Mitchell’s staging. Like Simon Stone and a number of other directors today, Mitchell isn’t content to tell the story. In this case, she adds phone-texting (the written conversations are printed above the stage beside the simultaneous English translation of what’s being sung), lesbianism, skullduggery, drugs, and more. Having the opera’s action occur in two or three simultaneous spaces is a Mitchell device I shall miss - she has a
“But also” mentality. But in her “Makropoulos”- where she sometimes has six different activities coinciding and where it’s not always clear who’s texting whom - things are unusually baffling.
Until now, this opera’s tragicomic central role of the prima donna Emilia Marty, has always been a superb vehicle for a singing actress of versatility, drive, and largeness of spirit. Performances by Lorna Haywood, Elisabeth Söderström, Josephine Barstow, Cheryl Barker, Karita Mattila are not to be forgotten. At Covent Garden, however, the Lithuanian soprano Aušryné Stundyte exhibited spirit but little variety of vocal colour. When this Emilia Marty expires, we feel no particular pathos, nor do we feel that some vital essence is passing from the world.
In most of his operas, Janáček is ambivalent about death apart from accepting its inevitability, but he is positive about life. Vitality pulsates through his work; and he usually shows life continuing after the death of even a central character. Mitchell, however, just isn’t on his wavelength. She reduces “Makropoulos” to shenanigans of sex and plotting. The final speeches of Emilia Marty (who has also been Elina Makropoulos, Ellian MacGregor, and Elsa Montez) have never counted for less.
The conductor Jakub Hrůša, still in his first months as the Royal Opera’s new music director, draws from the orchestra the spectrum of colour that Stundyte’s voice lacks; and his pacing always feels ideal. Amid a lively supporting cast, Johan Reuter (Baron Prus) and Sean Panikkar (Albert Gregor) leave especially strong impressions.
II.
The music of Jake Heggie is not on Janáček’s level, and yet the new English National Opera production of his “Dead Man Walking” (which - directed by another woman, Annilese Miskimmon - opened on Saturday 1 at the Coliseum) is a far larger-spirited affair. (It remains in repertory until November 18.) Here, too, we’re focused on life, death, and the passage from one to the other. Or rather those matters are far more clearly central here, whereas the Mitchell “Makropoulos Case” makes too many sidetracks from them far too often.
When you watch Tim Robbins’s famous 1995 film of this tale of a nun spending time with a killer who’s waiting on Death Row, you wonder how anyone could make an opera out of something so intimate and small-scale. When you watch the opera (which had its premiere in 2000), however, you wonder what the problem seemed to be. All praise to Terrence McNally’s libretto and to Heggie’s music for opening up the large matters of grief, loss, and soul that pervade this story - for reminding us how the intimate can become immense. We’re told that “Dead Man Walking” has become the most performed opera of the twentyfirst century; certainly it’s one of those that have brought new life to a genre that, fifty years ago, seemed largely a museum art.
And Heggie has created at least seven rewarding roles. He provide one ensemble, dominated by the four parents of the dead couple, that really breathes new life into the operatic potential of multiple characters sharing the same moment, and yet the opera rises to greater heights in duets and solos. The killer’s mother, Mrs Patrick De Rocher, becomes a role of far greater pathos in the opera; Sarah Connolly is at her finest in it. The baritone Michael Mayes takes us on one large arc as he moves from denial to honesty about his action, and from defiance to needy vulnerability in the face of impending death - while the mezzosoprano Christine Rice, as sister Helen Beaujean, enters spiritual zones of meditative inwardness that I have not heard in opera since Janet Baker over forty years ago. (Alas, she lacks Baker’s way with words: the fault is partly but not only in Heggie’s music.)
III.
Until November 10, the Guildhall School is giving a double bill of two rare operas from the first half of the twentieth century: Ethel Smyth’s “Der Wald” (1902) and Ottorino Respighi’s “Lucrezia” (1937). Although many speak of “Der Wald” as composed in Wagnerian mode, it seems to me more in the spirit of Wagner’s predecessor Carl Maria von Weber - but that’s an admirable spirit, though Smyth’s inspiration is patchy. “Lucrezia”, completed after Respighi’s death by his widow Elsa and his pupil Ennio Porrini for a (successful) premiere at La Scala, has several obvious debts to Puccini, but it has its own intriguing musico-dramatic character, heroically neoclassical. You surely think differently of Respighi after hearing it - it adds admirably to our knowledge of him.
The Guildhall chose these two operas because they offer impressive roles for larger female singers. (Until Kaija Saariaho’s “L’Amour de loin” in 2016, “Der Wald” was the only opera by a woman composer to have been performed by New York’s Metropolitan Opera: the great dramatic soprano Johanna Gadski led it. The soprano Maria Caniglia and the mezzosoprano Ebe Stignani, amid already illustrious careers, created the roles of Lucrezia and the quasi-choral La Voce at La Scala.)
On Monday 3, Seohyun Go (Röschen) and Avery Lafrentz (Iolanthe) each showed very striking vocal talent in the Smyth, while Hannah McKay showed a yet more ample and beautiful voice as Lucrezia. None of these three voices is quite mature, but they’re so arresting that it’s impossible not to hope they have important careers ahead of them. Gabriella Giulietta Noble (as Respighi’s La Voce) isn’t in the same vocal league, though her dramatic alertness was at every point welcome.
IV.
On Tuesday 4, the novelist Alan Hollinghurst won the David Cohen Prize for literature, the week after Jack Holden’s new play of his Booker Prize winning novel “The Line of Beauty” opened at the Almeida. My own favourite Hollinghurst novels are “The Folding Star” (1994) and “The Sparsholt Affair” (2017); the fascinating but thoroughly awkward subject of “The Line of Beauty” is how, in the London of the mid-1980s, its gay aesthete protagonist Nick Guest navigates one social circle shaped by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative politics while gradually discovering aspects of AIDS in his partly different gay circle.
Hollinghurst doesn’t make any neat either/or good/bad choices between the characters of “The Line of Beauty”. But the three-hour 2006 television series (excellently adapted by Andrew Davies, with first-rate acting throughout) makes Hollinghurst’s characters multifaceted and complex (almost more so than the novel itself), so that you keep re-evaluating them in a way worthy of Hollinghurst’s novelist hero Henry James - whereas Holden’s play, directed by Michael Grandage, keeps the tone too light and comic - and keeps us from caring much about any of the characters.
Charles Edwards (as the Tory MP Gerald) and Robert Portal (as his friend “Badger”) are among my favourite British actors. Yet, because of Holden (principally) and Grandage, their contributions here are relatively flimsy, without real three-dimensionality. Where you can see how the multifaceted talent of Dan Stevens in the role of Nick Guest on television opened up an important career, Jasper Talbot at the Almeida seems even more out of his depth than does his character.
@Alastair Macaulay, 2025