Written On Skin, Royal Opera House, review

Rupert Christiansen reviews the new opera Written on Skin at the Royal Opera House.

Barbara Hannigan as Agnes,  Bejun Mehta as Boy in Written on Skin
Barbara Hannigan as Agnes, Bejun Mehta as Boy in Written on Skin Credit: Photo: Alastair Muir

It’s not often that I’ve had cause to trumpet such a claim, but here is a new opera that is palpably a serious and important work of art, both exquisitely crafted and deeply resonant.

Written on Skin plays without an interval as a ninety-minute triptych. Its composer George Benjamin and librettist Martin Crimp - the quality and intensity of their collaboration requires equal creative billing - intend an allegory of some sort, but it is an opaquely inscrutable one that does not easily yield specific meaning.

A cruel and complacent medieval castellan commissions a nameless artist to produce an illuminated manuscript. The castellan has an illiterate and oppressed wife: she and the artist (who might be an angel) fall in love and at her urging, what he paints begins to reflect their relationship. The castellan senses what is happening and takes gruesome revenge.

The fable is loosely drawn from a Provençal ballad, but its peremptory violence and latent eroticism also give it the flavour of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale: in bare narrative outline it may seem simple enough, but as it echoes and distorts and surprises, the tale insidiously suggests that we see others only through a glass darkly: human motivation is a murky business.

The sense of oddity and alienation is enhanced by the way that the characters simultaneously both enact and narrate their own stories, as well as making disturbingly anachronistic references to car parks and shopping malls. Nothing here is quite what it seems.

Benjamin’s score is intricately woven into the text and story, as though illuminating a manuscript itself. In its dreamy yet crystalline beauty, it shows the lineaments of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, with richly expressive vocal lines and delicately lucid instrumental colouring (including bells, viols and glass harmonica) which evokes another world without resorting to cliché or pastiche. And for all the slowness of outward pace, the dramatic tension never slackens and the brutal climaxes are stupendous. This is music of genius.

Katie Mitchell’s production was much disliked when the opera was premièred at Aix last summer, but it seems to me immaculately choreographed and imaginatively sensitive to the opera’s implications and mood. It also draws superb performances from a flawless cast: Christopher Purves (the castellan), Barbara Hannigan (his wife), Bejun Mehta (the artist), and Allan Clayton and Victoria Simmonds as the choric angels, who seem to instigate as well as observe the action.

Benjamin’s conducting of his own music was literally authoritative, and the orchestral playing was ravishing. After a long run of mediocrity at the Royal Opera, what joy to encounter something as enthralling and enchanting as this.

Until 22 March

Tickets: 020 7304 4000; (www.roh.org.uk)