Review

Anthropocene, Scottish Opera, Theatre Royal Glasgow, review: icily resonant tale with a remorseless grip

Sarah Champion and Mark Le Brocq as in Scottish Opera's 'Anthropocene'  
Sarah Champion and Mark Le Brocq as in Scottish Opera's 'Anthropocene'  

Here is something for deepest winter, freezing cold yet red hot. In the seas off Greenland, a scientific research vessel, financed by a megalomaniac businessman, is trapped by the weather. Anxieties are intense. Then a party returns from the tundra with a large block of ice containing something miraculous that overturns everyone’s assumptions.

One might suppose that such a plot would lead to a crudely topical parable of climate change, but what unfolds is more subtle than that – a psychological thriller that touches on the myth of Frankenstein and the primitive belief that the blood of a scapegoat will purge, redeem and fructify. No further spoilers, but I was gripped by every minute of it.

This is the fourth opera written by composer Stuart McRae to a libretto by novelist and playwright Louise Walsh, and their decade-long experience of each other is evident. Their previous collaborations have been chamber pieces, and here they continue to keep the focus close and taut, advancing the story through crisply articulated dialogues between a small group of well-defined and sharply differentiated characters.

MacRae’s score is never merely illustrative of a text: there are episodes of rich lyricism, including a duet of almost Straussian sensuality for two sopranos and some marvellously inventive orchestral sonorities evoking both the rigours and splendours of the Arctic landscape through shimmering, skittering strings and growling brass. Its greatest virtue, however, is vividly fluent and expressive vocal writing that enlarges and illuminates the words and the situations as only opera can do.

Sadly, the piece is slightly let down by a low-budget staging clumsily directed by Matthew Richardson and unimaginatively designed by Samuel Blak around the idea of a white plastic curtain – an essential eeriness and sense of claustrophobic derangement are entirely absent.

Scottish Opera's 'Anthropocene'  
Scottish Opera's 'Anthropocene'  

No complaints, however, about Stuart Stratford’s whole-hearted conducting or the eloquent playing of Scottish Opera’s orchestra. The casting is canny too, with notably strong contributions from Benedict Nelson and Anthony Gregory as a journalist and engineer, and some virtuosic singing and touching acting from that dazzling young soprano Jennifer France as the mysterious creature whose story precipitates the denouement.

Anthropocene? It’s the name recently given to the geological era in which man has been on the scene, with largely catastrophic effects. Like everything else in this enthralling new opera, it resonates.

In Glasgow until Jan 26 (tickets: 0844 871 7647), then touring. Details: scottishopera.org.uk

 

 

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