Sunken Garden - review

Labelling Michel van der Aa's new opera as an "occult mystery" in the pre-premiere publicity for Sunken Garden turns out to be far more prophetic than ENO could possibly have imagined. It's Van der Aa's fourth fully-fledged music-theatre piece, and the first in which he's entrusted the text to someone else, the novelist David Mitchell. Despite the complexity and subtlety of its electronic and 3D cinematic elements, it's also the nearest to a conventional opera that he has composed so far.

The scenario that Mitchell has come up with is convoluted and opaque, and certainly difficult to grasp at a first encounter. The singers do their best, but, especially in the crucial final scenes, too much of the text is incomprehensible; there are no surtitles in the Barbican theatre, nor, it seems, were any printed copies of the libretto available either.

Sponsored by an arts foundation, a video artist Toby Kramer (sung by Roderick Williams) is making a film about the mysterious disappearance of an IT engineer, Simon Vines; after interviewing Simon's friends he comes to the conclusion that Simon and his girlfriend Amber have been abducted, though Zenna Briggs (Katherine Manley), who represents the foundation, is sceptical about the theory and thinks Toby is deluded.

At that point everything starts to unravel. Wandering around the city, Toby finds himself at a door in a flyover through which he enters a sunken garden. There amongst the foliage (filmed at the Eden Project in Cornwall) he finds frozen images of Simon and Amber, as well as a mysterious angel-like figure Marinus (Claron McFadden); it turns out that the whole garden is an "occult engine" built by Zenna for those who are poised between life and death; it's where their souls and memories are converted for immortality, leaving their bodies as moths. Gradually all the characters reveal traumatic back-stories, as Marinus tries to negotiate for their survival; the garden is eventually destroyed, but whether she ultimately succeeds seems unclear.

The connections with Van der Aa's 2006 opera After Life, based on Kore-eda's film and set in a way-station between life and death, are obvious, and some of the clips from Toby's film-in-progress screened in Sunken Garden are similar to the filmed interviews in the earlier work. As there, there's a gradual merging and deepening ambiguity between what is live and what is on film, though here with the use of 3D images Van der Aa uses the technique far more ambitiously than he has before, accompanying singers on film with the live orchestra, conducted by André de Ridder, and at one point including a quintet made up of three live performers and two on film.

With designs by Theun Mosk, Van der Aa has directed the stage show as well as the often sumptuous-looking film sequences. As always he's done it all with immense technical skill, and both his orchestral writing and the electronic soundtrack are strikingly effective. But when the score is at its most conventionally operatic, particularly in the opening scenes between Toby and Zenna, the vocal lines are banal, adding nothing to exchanges that could have been spoken, while Mitchell's text adapts uneasily to being sung at the best of times. Some of the lines he puts into the mouths of his characters come close to cliché, and in the end none of them really comes to life. You may be impressed by the sheer skill of it all, but unlike either After Life or Van der Aa's Fernando Pessoa piece The Book of Disquiet, it's never moving or engaging.

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