“None but the lonely heart can know my sadness”. Engraved on the headstone of Mary Kelly, one of Jack the Ripper’s victims, this phrase flickers as a refrain in the shadows of Iain Bell’s new opera. It could be the epitaph for each of the murdered women, the “canonical five” whose names are known, brought back to troubled life by Bell and his librettist, Emma Jenkins, in Jack the Ripper: The Women of Whitechapel. The three-hour work, a co-commission with Opera North, was given its world premiere at English National Opera last weekend, directed by Daniel Kramer and conducted by Martyn Brabbins.
Jack the Ripper makes a great title for an opera. Not for this one. Its subtitle – The Women of Whitechapel – is more interesting, more truthful. Bell and Jenkins, using documentary evidence (large quantities) and poetic licence (not quite enough), wanted to dignify London’s impoverished women, to value their existence before brutal deaths gave them grim celebrity. It’s an honourable aim. By giving the Ripper, who does not appear, top billing, that intention is neutered. Yet again their lives are framed by their assassin.
Let’s not get hung up on titles. There are other problems, and the work has taken a fair old critical bashing since opening night: praise for all the performers and the work’s intentions, gripes about the predominantly monochrome nature of both drama and music. New commissions need support. It’s not always easy to know how to give it. Operatic history is littered with works that do not work entirely successfully on first night. Had I been writing the day after, I might have made the same complaints. Now the task is to ask how or whether the work can find redemption for future performances.
The plot is episodic; ponderous in Act 1, but finding more pace after the interval. This is true of the music too, often delicately and sensitively coloured but lacking the robustness or tension needed for the subject matter. The use, at the opening, of the cimbalom – that raw Gypsy folk instrument in which metal hits metal in jangly collision – sounded too polite, instead or nervy and threatening. The divided string writing was often beautiful, sensitively illustrative rather than dramatic, and expertly played by the ENO orchestra, yet much of the score’s impact was oddly muted.
Bell has created roles for some of ENO’s veteran stars. Susan Bullock, Lesley Garrett, Janis Kelly, Marie McLaughlin and, more than half a century after first appearing with the company, Josephine Barstow, are all in splendid prime. Each of the Ripper’s victims is brought alive chiefly by the expertise of these performers: would these characters – Bullock as the gin-soaked, tottering Liz Stride, Barstow as the strident, morally depraved mother of the doss house – have enough individuality with less distinctive interpreters? It’s hard to think so.
Alongside them the young Welsh soprano Natalya Romaniw, who recently made her exciting ENO debut in La bohème as Mimi, sings Mary Kelly with heartfelt vehemence. Hers is the most fully developed role (her all-seeing, silent child winningly played by Ashirah Foster Notice). Nicky Spence, ever a bonus on stage, makes the most out of the brief but potentially interesting part of Sergeant Strong. Two ENO Harewood artists, Alex Otterburn as Squibby and William Morgan as the eyewitness Writer were sympathetic characters but, again, too slight to be more than two-dimensional.
Cast and chorus, with cameos from other ENO favourites, Robert Hayward and Alan Opie, gave sap to this struggling hybrid. Oliver!, Sweeney Todd, Les Mis and choruses from Peter Grimes keep pushing their way into this sound world of ballads and street cries. Kramer’s atmospheric staging, with handsome, sombre designs by Soutra Gilmour (lit by Paul Anderson) – a labyrinth of spy holes, doors, coffins, shadows – captured the sinister, desolate London of these Whitechapel women, and did its best to inject energy into a long work. The opera will now be seen at Opera North in October 2020. It’s no sign of weakness to have second thoughts, to look at what could be shortened (there’s repetition), tightened, clarified. Even two or three minutes of music is a long time. Take out 20 minutes and a powerful piece could emerge.
Peter Sellars, director and librettist extraordinaire, is no stranger to rethinking. He and John Adams, long-time operatic partners, recently revamped their Girls of the Golden West (also a documentary opera telling the women’s story). Sellars’s staging of Bach’s St John Passion, a collaboration with Simon Rattle first performed by the Berlin Philharmonic in 2014, has had time to mature. The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, on peerless form, gave its UK premiere on Tuesday, before a short European tour.
Led by Mark Padmore as the compassionate Evangelist and Roderick Williams as an uncannily credible Christus, the soloists were first class. Camilla Tilling, Christine Rice, Andrew Staples and Georg Nigl, together with the OAE chorus, made a glorious, well-matched ensemble, performing from memory, as did some of the solo musicians. The staging – movement only, everyone dressed in black – slows the musical pace while quickening the work’s intrinsic drama. Sellars creates tableaux analogous to those in religious paintings. Groups unite and disperse in endless fluidity. His signature hand gestures, pretentious to some, feel like natural expressions of emotion. Rattle, noticeably delighting in the entire realisation, followed the action around. At times he sat and observed, while the superb continuo players spun their delicate magic.
Star ratings (out of five)
Jack the Ripper: The Women of Whitechapel ★★★
Bach’s St John Passion ★★★★★
Jack the Ripper: The Women of Whitechapel is in rep at the Coliseum, London, until 12 April
