by Poul Ruders, libretto by Paul Bentley from Margaret Atwood's novel
seen at the London Coliseum on 14 April 2022
This is ENO's second production of The Handmaid's Tale, the first being staged in 2003 (the opera had its premeire in Copenhagen in 2000). The work is based on Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel of the same name, first published in 1985 and recently brought to attention again through a TV adaptation.
Annilese Miskimmon directs Kate Lindsey as Offred, Susan Bickley as Offred's mother, Emma Bell as Aunt Lydia, Avery Amereau as Serena Joy and Robert Heyward as the Commander, with an excellent supporting cast. The technical credits are all female, and the production is conducted by Joana Carneiro.
The premiss of the story is that a declining birthrate has brought about a crisis in the US during which fundamentalist 'Christian' groups have taken control and instituted the Republic of Gilead, in which women have lost all rights of citizenship and those that are fertile are farmed out to high-status men to produce children on behalf of their sterile wives. The situation is grotesque, the mechanics are demeaning, the abuse of power needed to keep everything functioning is appalling, but Atwood observed that nothing she had depicted had not been proposed or even enacted at various times or in various places in the past.
The opera is framed by a conference examining the Republic of Gilead presumably some time after its demise; attendees (us, the audience) are invited to listen to recently discovered tapes which are Offred's testimony of her experience as the chattel of Fred (the Commander). Her recollections of the political turmoil prior to the coup give some indication of the disruption and trauma of her young adulthood, though one of the most chilling events in the book, the day that all women discovered that their credit card accounts had been frozen and confiscated, is not directly mentioned. Most of the action, however, takes place in Gilead itself, and we witness various rituals and soon have a sense of the staggering oppression imposed by the authorities and colluded in by almost everybody.
Wisely, but depressingly, Offred's story has no satisfying conclusion. She appears to have been offered an escape from her predicament, but the tapes which generate the story of the opera were evidently made in secret before her escape, and so there is no knowing whether or not she survived - or even whether the 'escape' was itself a trick engineered by the authorities. Likewise the history of the Republic is not directly addressed: from the tone of the conference we assume it fell, but it is not the business of this particular tale to enlighten us about broader historical events. (A recently published sequel apparently provides some information about these matters, but I have not read it.)
Though much of the book is concerned with Offred's own intimate experience and inner reactions, it turns out that opera is an excellent vehicle for evoking the environment in which she is forced to survive. The training sessions, the intoning of rules, the stark and pre-determined conventions for dress, the routines of shopping, the stagey sessions of copulation and the revolting public executions are all made more powerful through the accompaniment of music and the sung voice. In a story in which the usual intererst of character development is almst entirely absent the operatic form provides a convincing framework for showing us a society which is quite alien and yet which is disturbingly plausible.
Once again ENO has created a visual impression largely composed of stage curtains - huge neutral swathes forming a square around the stage, which can be lit as stark grey or pale green, and occasionally a long pink curtain dropped towards the front of the stage to indicate a domestic interior - but on this occasion the device is entirely appropriate rather than cheese-paring. With only minimal props to indicate shopping emporia, a commemorative wall, medical rooms, and so forth, the overall impression is of institutional bleakness and suffocating pressure, offset by the managed explosions of emotional violence directed at dissidents and traitors. With the current awareness of the power of the state to manipulate news and the interpreation of events through social media (something not even conceived of in the 1980s when the book was written) the experience of watching this story unfold was in some ways even more disturbing than reading it decades ago. (I have not watched the TV series.)
I wondered whether the transfer from book to stage could work; this production and these performers convinced me that it does work very well.
