The Indian Queen

by Henry Purcell

seen 14 March 2015

Purcell's music, created to adapt a play by Sir Henry Howard and John Dryden into a semi-opera, was left unfinished at the composer's death in 1695. The production at English National Opera by Peter Sellars is a co-production between ENO, Perm State Opera (Russia) and Teatro Real in Madrid. It uses the fifty minutes Purcell had composed, together with excerpts from other works and settings of religious music by him, and also spoken text from Rosario Aguilar's novel 'The Lost Chronicles of Terra Firma'. The original plot of the play has been completely abandoned (it concerns a totally fictional struggle between 'Peru' and 'Mexico' set before the European arrival in the Americas) in favour of an extended rumination on the Spanish conquest of the Mayan peoples.

The result is a curious hybrid, not only the hybrid of 'semi-opera' (where operatic passages are interspersed with passages of ordinary play text), but also the hybrid of late seventeenth century music interrupted by modern choreography representing ancient Mayan rituals, and dramatic situations arising from modern sensibilities about invasion, colonisation and genocide. Everything is stylised, even remote, which works well for the creation myths of Mayan cosmology (four dancers in white body-suits, who also appear later in the production at moments where the spiritual world erupts in dreams), but it is less persuasive in scenes of massacre and subjugation, which are performed gracefully and silently by the chorus of peasants and a group of soldiers in modern fatigues wielding sub-machine guns. Yet the use of body language in highly ritualised gestures in all situations, even the extreme passions of love and violence, is cumulatively powerful.

The story of immediate personal interest amidst this hieratic background concerns Teculihuatzin (Julia Bullock), the Indian Queen, christened as Dona Luisa when she converts to Catholicism, who is sent by her father to marry Don Pedro de Alvarado (Noah Stewart), the most successful (and handsome) Spanish warrior, in order to act as a spy. She however falls in love with him and ceases to spy. Yet Don Pedro, though a passionate lover, treats her only as a concubine, and uses their daughter Leonor as a 'talisman', taking the child on expeditions of brutal oppression towards the native villagers who come out to see this strange result of the union of two races.

Several problematic concepts and ideas are jostling for attention in the piece. The immediate sensory impressions are very compelling - a striking design (set - Glugio 'Gronk' Nicandro; costumes - Dunya Ramicova; choreography - Christopher Williams), beautiful playing and singing of Purcell's music - but questions are always nagging. The character of the speaking woman (Maritxell Carrero) is given as Leonor, the daughter of Teculihuatzin and Don Pedro, but for much of the time she is speaking the direct experience of her mother; at other times she is narrating in the third person (for example, of the impressions of the first Spanish woman to arrive in Mexico), and only latterly narrating as Leonor herself. There is no clear connection between Don Pedro's initial ardour as a lover and his ferocity as a conqueror; he seems to be one thing or the other as the situation demands. At the end of the first half there is a massacre - stylised and silent as usual - but at the beginning of the second half it is the peasant chorus that sings the great appeal for forgiveness 'Remember not, Lord, our offences' - yet surely they are the victims, not the offenders.

A fascinating production, then, but one leaving many questions as to its coherence.