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Russell Thomas and Patricia Bardon in The Gospel According to the Other Mary
‘Impressive performance’ … Russell Thomas (Lazarus) and Patricia Bardon (Mary Magdalene). Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian
‘Impressive performance’ … Russell Thomas (Lazarus) and Patricia Bardon (Mary Magdalene). Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

The Gospel According to the Other Mary review – the Bible to Skid Row

This article is more than 9 years old

Coliseum, London
In ENO’s world stage premiere of John Adams’s passion oratorio, the conducting is superb, the playing and singing fabulously intense – and the principal soloists remarkable

English National Opera has two productions by Peter Sellars in its current season. His version of Purcell’s The Indian Queen, first seen in Perm last year, arrives at the Coliseum in February, but up first is John Adams’s passion oratorio, The Gospel According to the Other Mary, presented in what is billed as the work’s world stage premiere.

That may be strictly accurate, but Sellars’ staging seems essentially an elaboration of the concert presentation that he devised for the work’s first performance, in Los Angeles in 2012, which Gustavo Dudamel and the LA Philharmonic brought to the Barbican in March last year. But whether the work – designed, like its companion piece, Adams’ 2000 nativity oratorio El Niño, for performance in both concert hall and opera house – gains by the expansion is debatable.

The contemporary setting – a night shelter for homeless women on Los Angeles’ Skid Row, according to Sellars – is given substance in the razor-wire-topped fences and billowing canvas of Georges Tsypin’s set. That underlines the shuttling between the biblical past and the present in the libretto. Sellars’ patchwork of texts blurs the distinction between the two epochs to tell the story of Christ’s passion from the point of view of the women around him, interleaving passages from both old and new testaments with texts by a range of 20th-century women writers.

Patricia Bardon (Mary Magdalene) and Meredith Arwady (Martha). Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

The sense of the work as a series of static tableaux is partly mitigated here by the addition of four dancers to the action. Two double the roles of two of the vocal protagonists, Mary and her brother Lazarus, another represents Mary, the mother of Christ, and the fourth is the Angel Gabriel, a role taken by the remarkable flex-dancer Banks, who comes close to stealing the show in the second act, yet who gets no biography at all in the programme. But the rest of the staging is more or less as it was at the Barbican, and brings the feeling once again of something rather sanctimonious. Having a concern for the welfare of the dispossessed and the disenfranchised isn’t a Christian monopoly, after all, and there are undoubtedly moments in The Gospel According to the Other Mary when preaching takes over from music drama and the sense of narrative gets lost.

That might be less of a problem if the work was slightly shorter, and the dramatic shape clearer. Until the passover aria with which the first act ends, there’s too little to move things forward after the climax of Lazarus’s death and resurrection. The second act, pivoting on Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, seems tighter and more dramatically focused, perhaps because its orchestral interludes are more significant. For it is Adams’s immensely powerful score, easily the finest thing he has composed in more than two decades, that makes the whole experience truly worthwhile; its gut-wrenching harmonies, fiercely insistent rhythms and sudden moments of tingling melodic purity provide the solidity that the text and the staging so badly need.

It helps that the ENO performance is so impressive. It’s superbly conducted by Joana Carneiro, who gets fabulously intense, committed playing and singing from the ENO orchestra and chorus, while the three principal soloists are all, in their different ways, remarkable. Patricia Bardon makes Mary the work’s emotional core, always poised, always quietly, devastatingly eloquent. The contralto Meredith Arwady as her sister Martha is more direct and confrontational, while the tenor Russell Thomas makes the most of Lazarus’s passover aria, whose touching melody would not seem out of place in a high-class Broadway musical.

In rep until 5 December. Box office: 020-7845 9300. Venue: ENO

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