The Wasp Factory, Linbury Studio, Covent Garden - opera review

Don't go to Ben Frost's opera The Wasp Factory expecting to see the blood and gore that bespatter Iain Banks’s original novel. Frost's austere production (receiving its first UK performances two months after its Austrian premiere) is more sound installation than opera, and none the worse for that.

Such action as there is takes place in a vast, dirt-filled raised bed, within which three punky women, more narrators than characters, writhe their feral way through David Pountney’s elliptical libretto. Amplified, their singing combines rock, folk and a kind of speech-song, but is never conventionally operatic: a wise decision. The “orchestra”, five moody and minimalist strings, plays second fiddle to Frost’s electronic score, pumped out at often body-rattling volume, obscuring the text but establishing an ominous atmosphere. Beholden to its narrative obligations, the piece never quite takes off, but there are striking images, notably when the set tilts, pouring dirt onto the stage, and becoming a precipice up which the singers must clamber and cling.

At such moments you feel that Banks, who died in June and so never saw the opera, might have been intrigued by the rough beast his novel has become.

Until October 8. (020 7304 4000, roh.org.uk)