Pleasure review – Lesley Garrett shines as the lady of the loo

Lesley Garrett’s career has taken a curious trajectory, from ENO principal and prime-time television diva to scrubbing the toilets of a gay nightclub. At least, that’s the undignified situation in which she finds herself in Mark Simpson’s new opera, performed by Psappha and jointly commissioned by Opera North, Aldeburgh Music and the Royal Opera.

Simpson says that his inspiration came from his experiences on the Liverpool club scene, in which he and other young men sought emotional solace from a sybil-like toilet attendant. Yet it turns out to be the perfect operatic subject: squalid and earthbound yet imbued with a radiant, almost mythic quality.

Simpson – whose career took off 10 years ago when he won BBC Young Musician and Composer of the year at the same time - has once again teamed up with poet Melanie Challenger, who provided the words for the strange, occult oratorio The Immortal, which premiered at Manchester international festival last year. The libretto takes demotic delight in defining Garrett’s role: “Lily of the Lavvie … Queen of the Latrine … Slapper of the Crapper”; while Simpson bases his sound palette on lower-toned instruments, including two bass clarinets that gurgle lugubriously like something nasty disappearing round the S-bend.

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Tim Albery’s spectacularly seedy production features a hair-raising turn from Steven Page as a disco queen who performs a balloon striptease then slathers himself in ketchup. Nick Pritchard and Timothy Nelson are both affecting as two lost souls adrift in this Hedonistic Hades. But it is Garrett, in the least glamorous role of her career, who really commands the attention. “I walk the streets of the city, a middle-aged woman who nobody sees,” she laments. But it is the cognitive dissonance of a dowdy woman giving vent in such an expressive soprano that establishes Simpson’s essential point that ordinary people have opera-sized emotions too. At the start of what one hopes will be long operatic career, Simpson has pulled off a genuine coup: a glimpse of the numinal within sight of the urinal.

• At Howard Assembly Room, Leeds, until 30 April. Then touring until 14 May.