Prospero | Carnage at the Coliseum

A new opera tells the stories of Jack the Ripper’s victims

“Jack the Ripper: the Women of Whitechapel” is an impressive, if bleak, work of art

By R.G.

LAST YEAR your correspondent wrote a jocular blog post about the perils of taking his daughter to the opera, where she is constantly exposed to graphic sex, unspeakable violence and inappropriate female role models. As a sequel of sorts, the editor of Prospero suggested taking the same daughter to the world premiere of “Jack the Ripper: the Women of Whitechapel”, Iain Bell’s new show at the English National Opera.

Opera daughter is tough—for one thing, she has two brothers. After years of watching classic works such as “Carmen” and “Rigoletto”, she is also hardened to displays of toxic masculinity set to transcendentally beautiful music. But the tale of a Victorian psychopath who slashed poor women to death is gory even by operatic standards. It is also true, which makes it all the more harrowing to watch. And it is set to a far more challenging score than anything composed by Verdi or Mozart. There was no doubt that it would be an educational evening for a 16-year-old. But would she enjoy it?

The unexpected thing about “Jack the Ripper” is that the titular murderer never appears on stage: the story is told from the point of view of his victims. Mr Bell and the librettist, Emma Jenkins, were determined to “restore humanity and dignity to those women whose lives were stolen”. To this end, they mined contemporary accounts not only for all the facts they could find about the victims—which were somewhat scanty—but also for information about the lives of other women who inhabited the same dark slums of Whitechapel in the 1880s. They appear to have condensed all the most unhappy stories they could dig up into two-and-a-half hours of unremitting gloom.

Here, the women of Whitechapel sell their bodies because they are always “one man away from hunger”. They sleep in a dosshouse in wooden beds that look like open coffins. When Maud, the dosshouse proprietor, decides to sell 8-year-old Magpie to an anonymous rich paedophile, her mother Mary objects, pointing out that she has taught the girl to read and write in the hope of giving her a better life. Maud retorts that this is pointless, since Magpie is doomed to a life of prostitution whatever they do. “There is only pain,” she says; resisting will only make it worse, so they might as well sell the girl. Maud, sung by Dame Josephine Barstow, makes this case with force and a stunning soprano voice. But it is a ridiculous argument, and Magpie’s mother does not accept it for a moment, not least because she knows that Maud is being paid handsomely to deliver the “fresh parcel”.

Throughout the opera, a chorus of horrible men in frock coats and top hats represents the Victorian patriarchy. They leer at the women, surround them and intimidate them. An early pornographer makes an appearance, and proves to be even more sordid than he seems; the chief of police turns out to be a monster. The plot—all the women are waiting to see who will be stabbed next—is grimly inevitable. The music veers from ominous to furious.

One or two male characters are more pleasant, but it doesn’t end well for them either. Squibby, a young man who works at a nearby slaughterhouse, is in love with Mary and brings the women scraps of skin and grease and bone, which they ravenously fall on and fight over. Later, because he has blood on his clothes (as you would expect of someone who works in a knacker’s yard), a mob mistakes him for Jack the Ripper and lynches him.

One of the few light episodes is when the women go and get drunk in a pub. Their drinking song is a delight—but the audience is reminded that most of them have serious alcohol problems, which is one reason why they are working the streets.

After the show ended, opera daughter was polite, but not exactly gushing. The authors had intended “The Women of Whitechapel” as a timeless commentary on the fraught relations between the sexes: “the slums may have been cleared but so much remains the same for women,” Ms Jenkins writes in the programme notes. Opera daughter found this a bit far-fetched. She would be frightened to go out alone after dark in 19th-century Whitechapel, she said, but had no plans to change her real-life walk to school. Britain in Victorian times was poorer than some African countries are today, and its gender norms were akin to those in modern Saudi Arabia. It may be fashionable to argue that not much has changed, but it has, and spectacularly for the better.

“Jack the Ripper: the Women of Whitechapel” is an impressive work of art, if you like unrelenting tension, menace and misery, bereft of hope. The cast, including Lesley Garrett, Susan Bullock, Janis Kelly and Natalya Romaniw, were superb. But next time opera dad might take his daughter to something more cheerful, like “Les Misérables”.

“Jack the Ripper: the Women of Whitechapel” is showing at the English National Opera until April 12th

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