Michael Nyman and Michael Hastings' first opera together, Man and Boy: Dada, dealt with the relationship between the artist Kurt Schwitters, a London schoolboy and his widowed mother. Their second is a forensic examination of another unlikely pairing. The two protagonists of Love Counts, first seen in Karlsruhe last year, and receiving its British premiere here, are Patsy, a punch-drunk, middleweight boxer, and Avril, a divorced maths lecturer.
The couple meet in a park, he in tracksuit and trainers, shadow-boxing a tree, she in a cardigan and sensible shoes, riding her bicycle. It soon emerges that Patsy is innumerate, and as Avril starts to teach him to count, a romance begins, even though as a refugee from an abusive marriage, she abhors his boxing. It is all he knows, however, and he is lured back to the gym to teach an up-and-coming fighter; the youngster turns out to have a killer punch, though, and Patsy collapses in the ring. In the final scene he is in wheelchair, pushed round the park by Avril, but gradually regaining his faculties and his ability to count.
Hastings' libretto tells this simple story clearly, in a series of progressively shorter cinematic scenes in which the word setting allows the text to be delivered speedily. But then Nyman's whole approach to opera is utilitarian. There's no indulgence of the voice beautiful in his writing; the vocal lines and the ensemble writing supporting them are there most of all to convey the narrative, though Nyman derives many of Patsy's gruff vocal lines from a collection of Bach chorale harmonisations, so that the recognisable fragments that occasionally surface seem like the shattered images the boxer's brain has irretrievably jumbled.
There are a few loopholes in the story - there's no reason for Avril to be a university lecturer rather than, say, a primary-school teacher, except to ratchet up the incongruity of the relationship; and the way she teaches number systems to Patsy doesn't bear close inspection. But in this production by Lindsey Posner, conducted by Paul McGrath, those reservations melt away thanks to the power of the two main performances - Andrew Slater is wonderfully believable as the gravelly voiced, slow-witted Patsy, his swagger long beaten out of him, and is perfectly counterpointed by Helen Williams's vulnerable, compassionate Avril. Together they bring the opera to life quite marvellously.
· Until July 23. Box office: 020-7359 4404.
