Review: INNOCENCE, Royal Opera House

Here it is, opera's answer to A Little Life: Kaija Saariaho's Innocence follows the aftermath of a school shooting and the emotional destruction felt by those connect to the event. Like A Little Life it unrelentingly examines trauma and violence. But this is no jagged knife that lavishes in nastiness, it's an injection whose spike you can hardly feel as it burrows under the skin.

Set across two timelines in modern day Finland, one following the massacre, another tracing the wedding of the perpetrator's brother ten years later, the two stories are woven together as a tapestry of tragedy. Tereza, a waitress at the wedding who lost her daughter in the shooting, is the lynchpin between the worlds linking them through personal trauma and across time.

The production starts in darkness with a grim sonorous hum emanating from the orchestra pit. Conductor Susanna Mälkki draws out deftly the music's chilling juxtapositions; low oppressive tones murmur but are suddenly lacerated by wailing strings. Saariaho's music offers no sanctuary, we are left out in the cold.

Sofi Oksanen's libretto, sung in nine languages, traps characters in their own worlds, literally and metaphorically unable to communicate. Much of what we hear is warped and atonal. Some of the libretto is semi-spoken but uncannily distorted as if we too are trapped in a liminal space between the present and memory.

We never see the chorus who echo from offstage with ghostly menace, but then a voice will slice it from high above: Tereza's daughter performs a "yoik," a Finno-Urgic folk music technique, as devastating as it is elegant.

Interestingly the music often settles for second place behind the enigmatic aesthetics. Chloe Lamford's set, a revolving Rubix Cube peels away a new liminal layer of misery with each rotation, dominates the experience. It's not a disadvantage, Stone's focus is the opera's moral greyness thrust front and centre for us to examine from all sides.

The box set has become director Simon Stone's visual trademark; it's like a snow globe suffocating what's inside it, whilst magnifying its contents for those looking in. Rooms flicker eerily between the wedding and the school as if we are gazing into the fracturing memories of someone frozen in time by trauma.

The production even dares us to sympathise with the shooter. Curiously we only ever see his face when he is bullied by his classmates and his brother, the groom to be, still loves him despite everything. The question that looms over it all is a dangerous one: who bears the responsibility of such tragedy?

Innocence's power would have a more pressing immediacy in America, where the majority of school shootings take place. Here in the UK, distanced from those sorts of tragedies, its effect is more contemplative. Fundamentally it's not about the shooting, it's about the ramifications of violence and the metaphysics of collective guilt. Neither are easy questions to ponder, nor is this an easy opera to sit through. But it feels necessary to do so regardless.

Innocence runs at the Royal Opera House until 4 May

Photo Credit: Tristam Kenton

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