The Monstrous Child review – gods, love and death in the underworld

The first opera to open in the Royal Opera House’s refurbished and much improved studio space is a world premiere. Gavin Higgins’ The Monstrous Child is based upon the book by Francesca Simon, who extracted the libretto from her bestselling teen novel. Riffing on characters from Norse mythology, it tells the story of Hel, illegitimate daughter of the mischievous Loki, who is born with a normal human torso but with legs that are dead and decaying.

Hel narrates her tale: she is rejected at birth by her parents and banished to the underworld by Odin, king of the gods, where she rules over the dead. There she grows up, nurturing her resentment and brooding on her unrequited love for Baldr, Odin’s son. But when Baldr is killed and enters Hel’s realm, she gains her revenge, refusing Odin’s pleas to return his son to the living and so ensuring the destruction of the gods – yet offering the possibility of a new beginning for the world.

It’s a plot dense with detail but Simon’s tight, wittily macabre text conveys it clearly. The opera lasts just two hours, including interval; nothing is extraneous – only the ending seems a bit soggy. Higgins’ score is equally taut, never overloading the telling vocal lines with instrumental writing and generating huge power from the 10-piece ensemble (the Aurora Orchestra under Jessica Cottis) in the interludes. Timothy Sheader’s production, designed by Paul Wills, is equally lucid, using puppets to depict Hel’s birth and the monstrous child’s early years, but it becomes more conventionally operatic and straightforward as the work goes on.

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As an operatic debut for Higgins, it is tremendously accomplished, and there are some hugely impressive individual stage performances, especially from the mezzo Marta Fontanals-Simmons, who is on stage throughout as Hel. She dominates, though Lucy Schaufer also makes a real character out of Modgud, the giant who guards the bridge into the realm of the dead. There are vivid cameos from Rosie Aldridge and Tom Randle as Hel’s parents, Angrboda and Loki, and from Graeme Broadbent as Odin and Dan Shelvey as Baldr. But it’s Fontanals-Simmons’s show, and very much Higgins’s too.