★★☆☆☆
The last opera created by the composer George Benjamin and the writer Martin Crimp, Written on Skin, was a lesson in love and violence, a taut, creepy psychological thriller acclaimed around the world. Sadly, lightning hasn’t struck twice. Again their subject matter is medieval — the transgressive life and lurid death of King Edward II — but the new opera has little of its predecessor’s riveting drama.
Which is odd. Christopher Marlowe’s play on the same subject is infamously shocking, not just for the king’s murder with a red-hot poker, but for the tensions between gay love and ruthless court politics, self-obsessed king and embittered, sexually frustrated queen, and the make-believe world of art and music represented by the king’s dangerously glamorous lover,