Review

Jack the Ripper: the Women of Whitechapel, ENO - draining the life out of a full-blooded story, review

Susan Bullock and Lesley Garrett in Jack the Ripper: the Women of Whitechapel
No fun at all: Susan Bullock and Lesley Garrett in Jack the Ripper: the Women of Whitechapel Credit: Alastair Muir

They’ve fumbled the catch here, and I left the Coliseum shaking my head in rueful disbelief. Given a subject as jam-packed with drama, mystery and good old gore as the Ripper murders, how could composer Iain Bell and librettist Emma Jenkins come up with anything as soporifically slow and dreary as this?

There’s nothing wrong with their concept: instead of focusing on the whodunit question, the opera addresses the story from the perspective of the last days of the five very poor women who were murdered and disembowelled. Nor can Bell and Jenkins be accused of pandering to clichés: worthily, they have kept all questions of Jack’s identity at bay and refrained from glamorising the material into Sweeney Todd Victorian melodrama.

But in the process they’ve drained the life out of it, presenting a meandering plot that never cumulates any sort of theatrical tension or climax: instead there’s an excess of under-developed characters, a lot of speechifying and breast-beating of a pseudo-feminist nature. Too much happens, and nothing happens, and oh dear, it is no fun at all.

More’s the pity, because Bell writes so fluently and lyrically for the voice. The music’s idiom is tonal and approachable, without sinking into pastiche: the influence of Peter Grimes is evident, both in Bell’s attempt to create the sense of a community and in the rapturous ensembles for massed sopranos. But the pace is consistently turgid, and nothing kicks or bites. I longed for more thumping oom-pah-pah, more shrieking and bawling, just a hint of the raucous energy and hilarity that is the poor’s strongest weapon against misery and degradation.

All is not lost. Daniel Kramer’s staging, rich in East End smoke and fog and sinister men in black circling their female prey, is enhanced by Soutra Gilmour’s setting, a dosshouse that also suggests prison and brothel and backstreet grime. It is also well served by Martyn Brabbins’s carefully calibrated conducting and a superb cast.  

Glowing: Natalya Romaniw
Glowing: Natalya Romaniw Credit: Alastair Muir

At 78, Josephine Barstow still has the chops and more - her portrayal of a cynical old dosshouse keeper is sharply etched and vivid. At the other end of the age scale, Natalya Romaniw, still in her twenties, proves yet again that there is world-class potential in her luscious glowing soprano: she draws some real emotion out of the attempts of the Ripper’s final victim Mary Kelly to save her daughter from prostitution.

Four other veterans Susan Bullock, Marie McLaughlin, Lesley Garrett and Janis Kelly all sing and act their darned stockings off as fallen women - Kelly is particularly poignant as the drunken Polly Nichols - and a young baritone Alex Otterburn makes a notable Coliseum debut as kindly Squibby from the knacker’s yard. With this amount of talent going for it, Jack the Ripper could have been a real treat; alas, it just drags.

Until April 12. Tickets: 020 7845 9300; eno.org

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