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Giving everything she's got … Eva-Maria Westbroek in Anna Nicole at the Royal Opera House, London.
Life and soul … Eva-Maria Westbroek in Anna Nicole at the Royal Opera House, London. Photograph: Tristram Kenton Photograph: /Tristram Kenton
Life and soul … Eva-Maria Westbroek in Anna Nicole at the Royal Opera House, London. Photograph: Tristram Kenton Photograph: /Tristram Kenton

Anna Nicole review – a scabrous tale of sex, money and ambition

This article is more than 9 years old
Royal Opera House, London
Richard Jones’s revival is well done, but time has not been kind to this operatic life of the model and actor Anna Nicole Smith

Now on its first London revival, Mark-Anthony Turnage’s operatic biography of model, B-movie actor and reality TV star Anna Nicole Smith hugely divided opinion at its 2011 premiere. Time hasn’t been particularly kind to it. Much of the original controversy focused on the scabrous libretto by Richard Thomas, co-creator of Jerry Springer: The Opera. Now the expletives no longer provoke the shock-and-titter response they once did, we’re more aware of the opera as a prurient, rather conventional morality tale on the supposedly ruinous combination of sex, money and ambition.

Comparisons have already been drawn with Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, Massenet’s Thaïs and Berg’s Lulu. More pertinent, perhaps, are the overtones of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, with its links between excess and instability, and Kurt Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins – in which another antiheroine, also called Anna, similarly becomes a monster in search of the American dream. Evoking the frames of reference within which the work operates, however, draws attention to the problems with the score, which is rooted in Turnage’s familiar classical-jazz-music theatre amalgam, yet also curiously unmemorable and often worryingly samey.

It’s extremely well done, though some of the big routines that dominate the first half of Richard Jones’s production could be crisper. Eva-Maria Westbroek gives everything to the title role, hinting throughout at the vulnerability and sadness beneath the slap and silicone. Rod Gilfry oozes seediness as Anna’s besotted if manipulative lawyer, Stern, and there are beautifully judged performances from Alan Oke as J Howard Marshall II, the 89-year old billionaire she married in 1994, and Susan Bickley as her disapproving yet concerned mother, Virgie. Conductor Antonio Pappano does some fine things; I just wish the piece itself were better.

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