★★★★☆
Little Red Riding Hood kills the wolf. Queen Herod orders all the baby boys to be murdered. Mrs Icarus stands on a hillock, watching her husband, a “total, utter, absolute, grade-A pillock”. These characters are from Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife, her 1999 poetry anthology about the wives of famous men. It has been turned into a “digital chamber opera” for solo soprano, string quartet and live loop pedals by the composer Tom Green, and the result (for Welsh National Opera) is very effective.
It helps that the raw material is first-rate. Duffy’s lines blaze with passion, perception and wit, her language is direct and the people they portray feel utterly alive. Green has chosen 11 of the 30 poems for his