Violet is the best new British opera in years
What happens when the world you know disappears overnight? Post pandemic we all have some idea. But back in 2019 when composer Tom Coult and playwright Alice Birch (Anatomy of A Suicide; Lady Macbeth) created Violet – an opera about loss and hope and the end of the world – it was still fantasy. Thank goodness. Because without that innocence, Violet could never have been so clear-eyed, so completely uncluttered by recent history. Fierce and funny, magical and precise, it’s a dazzling piece – the best new British opera we’ve seen for some time.
Which is all the more striking when you realise that it’s also a first for both Coult and Birch: his first opera score, her first libretto. Opera-making is a dark art. Great composers (Wagner, Beethoven) and great writers (Auden, Forster) have stumbled in early attempts, and it’s rare to see such complete assurance and alchemy between collaborators.
A small village is in crisis. Time is disappearing, at first just an hour, then more and more. Crops are dying, food is running out, men are killing their cattle and wives. Everyone is terrified – everyone except Violet. The possibility of the apocalypse jolts her out of the numbness of her marriage. Faced with certain death, she finally decides to start living.
There’s a fable-like quality to Birch’s story. The simply structured scenes reflecting individual days and the sense of familiarity that falls away to reveal alien menace beneath creates a strong skeleton for Coult to build his music around. This is a story about gaps – between understanding and action, people, in time and life – and both plot and score understand the value of negative space, of not telling, not explaining. The result is gnomic, by turns witty and deeply unsettling.
Coult, whose award-winning career was launched when he signed with Faber aged just 25, studied with George Benjamin. It’s no reflection on Violet’s own voice that you can trace its lineage back to the older composer’s Pied Piper-retelling Into the Little Hill and, more recently, the domestic tragedy Written on Skin – one of the few operas of the past decade to have entered the international repertoire.
Concision and precision – of colour, gesture, and expression – are shared characteristics. But Coult tempers restraint with occasional moments of excess from his four singers and a 13-strong London Sinfonietta. Spare textures suddenly thicken into a web of instrumental strands, contrabass clarinet dark against glinting harp, a riot of ticking and clicking percussion pulsing beneath. Then a voice limited to single, bell-chime syllables – “Yes”, “No” – suddenly flowers into Monteverdi-like melismas; a vocal arpeggio soars up and up.
Jude Christian’s production catches the precision of Violet’s words and music. Simple objects – a wooden trestle table, a jug of flowers, a bread-knife, a tree suspended upside-down from the ceiling – create a domestic still-life. A giant screen, flooded with Adam Sinclair’s colourful nd convulsive animations, supplies a shifting backdrop. Costumes suspend us somewhere between Tudor England and the present day, the formality of pleated ruffs and Violet’s own ribboned pigtails and pinafore absurd in the face of the coming apocalypse.
Andrew Gourlay conducts an account glowing with detail and life. Richard Burkhard swings from absolute control to collapse as patriarch Felix, and there are worlds contained in both Andrew MacKenzie-Wicks’ querulous Clockkeeper and Frances Gregory’s loyal retainer Laura. But the show belongs to Anna Dennis’s Violet. Voraciously eating cereal out of a packet, a woman-child full of mischief and wisdom, the soprano soars through Coult’s score without ever seeming to alight – the strange, still point at the centre of a collapsing musical universe.
Performances remaining on 5 June (Snape Maltings) and 23 June (Hackney Empire)
