Written On Skin, Covent Garden - opera review

George Benjamin’s orchestra is rich with percussion and sundry antique exotica says Nick Kimberley
P39 Written on Skin ©Alastair Muir
©Alastair Muir
19 March 2013

At Covent Garden, contemporary opera is often consigned to the gloomy basement dungeon of the Linbury Theatre. From time to time, though, the Royal Opera takes a punt and stages something new in the main house. The latest recipient of this honour is George Benjamin’s Written on Skin, premiered in Aix last year and now receiving its first UK performances.

Benjamin is not a composer to rush things; he is 53 and this is only his second opera. Like the first, its libretto is by playwright Martin Crimp, although Crimp doesn’t describe it as a libretto, because the word is a diminutive, meaning “little book”. The term that has served opera for centuries is just not big enough for him.

The story Crimp tells is direct enough. In 13th-century Provence, a powerful man, the Protector, sees his wife Agnès as just another possession. He commissions a celebration of his life from the Boy, a manuscript illuminator, to whom Agnès is sexually attracted; the Boy reciprocates. The Protector finds out, murders the boy and forces the woman to eat his heart. She defiantly proclaims “Nothing will ever take the taste of that boy’s heart out of this mouth” and then kills herself.

Repeated references to “the Saturday car-park” or “the international airport” jolt us back and forth in time, and a mysterious band of Angels similarly bridge ancient past and unspecific present. Yet too many passages are anti-dramatic and preeningly overwrought. Knitting them into an opera is no easy task but Benjamin is a meticulous composer (he also conducts these performances). His orchestra is rich with percussion and sundry antique exotica, including glass harmonica and viola da gamba; from the pit there is always something to engage the ear.

To match the opera’s rather too self-conscious divide between past and present, real and symbolic, Vicki Mortimer’s sets split the stage into two levels and multiple spaces. Within them Katie Mitchell provides straightforward if sometimes overly busy direction, to which the singers respond with fierce commitment. The interplay of voices, particularly between Agnès (soprano Barbara Hannigan) and the Boy (counter-tenor Bejun Mehta), is never less than sensuous.

As the Protector, Christopher Purves seethes with barely contained rage and sings with maximum clarity. Mehta gets less character into his part but Hannigan, who has natural catwalk glamour to match a voice of bewitching beauty, charts Agnès’s path from servitude to resistance to self-destruction with uncanny precision.

Until March 22 (020 7304 4000, roh.org.uk)