Each opera in Nova Music Opera’s double bill, directed by Richard Williams and part of the Cheltenham festival, dealt with a notorious legal case, both of which had grim outcomes. No easy evening, then.
In Entanglement, receiving its premiere, composer Charlotte Bray and librettist Amy Rosenthal conjure Ruth Ellis, who murdered her racing-driver lover David Blakely, and is remembered as the last woman to be hanged in Britain, almost exactly 60 years ago. Pleading not guilty but admitting she’d shot him, Ellis was resigned to dying, imagining it as a reunion with the man she loved. A metallic-edged, chill aura of sound sets the tone of the 40-minute piece, its very compression mirroring the short weeks between the shooting and the death penalty.
Yet Bray and Rosenthal are at pains to go deeper into Ellis’s story than her defence team did at the time, emphasising her abusive relationship with the shallow Blakely (tenor Greg Tassell), her anger at being rejected by his friends, and the apparent complicity of a former lover, Desmond Cussen (baritone Howard Quilla Croft), whose gun was her weapon. The tangled question is reopened: was this a crime of passion or a cold-blooded murder? Kirsty Hopkins commanded attention as the peroxide-blonde Ellis, steely and needy, implying an impassive and obsessive nature alongside moments of maternal behaviour.
Thomas Hyde’s That Man Stephen Ward was first heard in 2008, before Geoffrey Robertson and Andrew Lloyd Webber brought the society osteopath’s name back into currency. Hyde’s one-man/multiple-persona show was brilliantly sustained by baritone Damian Thantrey, supported by actors miming John Profumo, Yevgeny Ivanov and Christine Keeler. The injection of a cabaret-style lightness, emphasising Ward as the scapegoat of this high-life/low-life affair, was perceived in despairing flashbacks as he was reduced to suicide.
Conductor George Vass kept it all crisp enough for the two death cycles to overlap by the end, as indeed they did in real life.
- At the Presteigne festival, Wales, on 27 August. Box office: 01544 267800.
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