The Gospel According to the Other Mary, ENO, review: 'humbling'

“A Passion oratorio” is how the composer John Adams and librettist and director Peter Sellars have labeled their ecumenical attempt to reinvent for today’s audiences Bach’s mode of dramatising Jesus’s last days.

Using soloists, chorus and mute dancers in austerely stylised fashion, Adams and Sellars take women’s perspectives on a story that has traditionally been seen through men’s eyes, interweaving biblical texts with extracts from the writings of contemporary feminists and “activists for social justice”.

The action is simultaneously both ancient and modern, as the synopsis for the opening scene suggests. “Shrieks of a woman in drug withdrawal in the jail call next to Mary rend the night … Mary and her sister Martha have opened a house of hospitality for homeless and unemployed women that survives on donations and small miracles. They have welcomed Jesus into their family.”

So don’t come expecting a fun night out, o ye of little faith. It’s all relentlessly high-minded, and at first I felt a deadly air of holier-than-thou priggishness hanging over the enterprise - we are in bleeding heart territory here, commanded to pity the dispossessed and love peace and justice, without the power of Bach’s genius to stir authentic feeling.

There’s too much aimless, shapeless frenzy and hot air in Adams’s score, while Sellars’s direction leans heavily on his trademark quirks and tricks, notably in the chorus’s meaninglessly choreographed hand gestures and the factitious expressions of woe which the soloists are required to emote. Only a beautiful and unexpected realisation of the raising of Lazarus ambushed my imagination; the Passover scene which ends the first act is pure kitsch.

But after the interval, the drama quickens and sharpens, as Adams’s music catches fire in an orchestral interlude of brazen savagery worthy of Prokofiev. A haunting muttering lament follows Jesus to Golgotha, rising to a shattering climax for the crucifixion and subsiding into an eerie restless calm for the scenes in Gethsemane. Finally, I was intrigued, engaged and humbled.

First performed in concert two years ago, The Gospel According to the Other Mary receives its first theatrical production here. English National Opera has engaged an almost entirely American cast and creative team, using only the home choral and orchestral forces, conducted forcefully by the Portuguese Joana Carniero.

A canvas tent, furnished with a steel fence and cardboard boxes, frames the crisply executed staging. Jesus does not appear: his presence remains spectrally immanent. A trio of counter-tenors, singing mostly in close harmony, embody the narrating seraphim, Patricia Bardon and Meredith Arwady are Martha and Mary, and the excellent Russell Thomas is Lazarus. But the outstanding performer of the evening is a marvellously expressive flex dancer, gnomically identified in the programme only as Banks. The spirit seems to move him.

Until 5 December; www.eno.org, 020 7845 9300