Review: ANGEL'S BONE, London Coliseum

Content warning: this review contains references to human trafficking, rape, torture, suicide and extreme violence. ENO recommends Angel's Bone for ages 18 and over.

Whether intentionally or not, London’s opera houses have leaned hard into the Halloween season with an unspoken theme of “go bleak or go home”. Over in Covent Garden, there’s a revival of Philip Venables’s 4.48 Psychosis (adapted from Sarah Kane’s final play, completed shortly before she took her life aged just 28). The English National Opera, meanwhile, has plumped for something even darker.

Two angels tumble out of the firmament and land squarely in the suburban purgatory of Mr and Mrs X.E’s lives. The unhappily married couple see these celestial beings as their salvation. Before you can say “holy cow”, the pair start up a business selling blessings and hold a party to celebrate their good fortune. Composer Du Yun and librettist Royce Vavrek’s Pulitzer-winning work is a bludgeoning, 85-minute parable about human trafficking, spiritual commodification, and the banal face of modern evil. Bringing the production south to St Martin’s Lane after its Manchester premiere in May, ENO delivers an evening that aggressively swerves the polite, plush-velvet escapism its audiences usually queue up for.

Australian director Kip Williams made his name in London with his acclaimed one-woman versions of The Picture of Dorian Gray and its follow-up Dracula. In both productions, squads of camera operators dashed about Sarah Snook and Cynthia Erivo respectively as they monologued or conversed with pre-recorded characters on the many screens around them. Angel’s Bone is Williams’ UK opera debut and here the camera crew numbers just three, working a set made up of two main screens and a deconstructed house sandwiched between them. Whether that reflects budget constraints or early caution in a new art form is unclear, but he still succeeds in compressing messy three-dimensional stage action into a crisp, cinematic 2D narrative.

In Manchester, the production was staged in the round with audiences standing throughout, sightlines at the mercy of whoever was in front. At the Coliseum, everyone is seated but the visual frustrations persist. The scenery continually blocks the lower section of the rear video screen and the singers too, while the camera operators wandering the stage are a nagging distraction. Too often, your eyes are dragged away from the live action and up to the screens to work out what is going on.

That lens makes the violence done to Boy Angel and Girl Angel relentless. Close-ups magnify the torture implements and their handiwork with brutal precision: before their wings are snipped off with a pair of shiny silver garden secateurs, the angels are flayed, their feathers torn away to expose the raw, bloody surface underneath.

The surrounding world is no less vicious. Party guests arrive and inflict casual atrocities. One woman’s fury about unanswered prayers sees her knee Boy Angel in his broken ribs; when he falls to the floor, she repeatedly kicks him in the same place with her pointed shoes. Girl Angel recounts how a client licks her open wing-wounds to suck out the marrow. Both suffer sexual assault, culminating in Boy Angel’s rape by Mrs X.E. and her impregnation with his child.

If that abridged summary sounds horrifying, imagine it projected in close-up across the stage of London’s largest theatre. On press night, several people walked out partway through this Grand Guignol and one woman fainted.

Musically, Du Yun’s score shatters standard lyric-theatre composition to match the gore. It is a genre-colliding onslaught that smashes together chamber music, cabaret grit, and abrasive punk into a grinding mix. At one point, a metal object is rattled over what sounds like a radiator, again and again. By the end, the Coliseum feels less like an opera house and more like an underground gig venue where the amps have been cranked into the red.

Allison Cook and Rodney Earl Clarke anchor the chaos with terrifyingly mundane domestic cruelty. Their suburban captors are no moustache-twirling melodramatic villains; they are exhausted, financially desperate strivers who slip into atrocity with bureaucratic efficiency. The intelligent casting of Mariam Wallentin (the Swedish cross-genre singer best known as one half of drums-and-voice duo Wildbirds & Peacedrums) and Matthew McKinney (a Kathleen Ferrier Award-winning Scottish tenor) gives the fallen angels a hollow, shattered dignity, with both resisting any temptation to turn celestial despair into pretty aria work.

Nor is this the most demanding thing ENO is cooking up in Manchester. Next summer, Phelim McDermott brings Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach to Aviva Studios, the first UK staging of the 1976 opera in 15 years. It runs to around five hours with no storyline, no characters to speak of and no interval (punters may wander in and out as their bladders dictate). Once again McDermott is pushing the limits of this art form: while he used the Gandini Jugglers for his last stab at a Glass opera, this time around acrobats and parkour artists will be clambering over a train carriage in “a 360-degree world”. His Satyagraha and Akhnaten both became unlikely Coliseum sell-outs, and this completes his Glass portrait trilogy. Londoners will need a train ticket north. After 85 minutes of flaying, five hours of a chorus counting to eight sounds almost like a spa day.

By turning human trafficking into an avant-garde sensory assault complete with graphically detailed degradation, the production dances dangerously close to trauma tourism. Yet Williams’s staging earns its cruelty. Trapped in his high-tech panopticon, we are locked in the room with the abusers, forced to watch the machinery of exploitation grind away in pin-sharp focus until the final silence drops over the house and the applause feels like complicity. ENO went bleak, some went home unexpectedly early but those that stayed saw something that shifted the boundaries of modern opera.

Angel's Bone continues at London Coliseum until 31 October.

Photo credit: Ellie Kurttz

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