How should ordinary people respond to the climate crisis – a crisis which worsens with every passing year? It is a question of such overwhelming scale and urgency that it can feel hard to locate an answer. Two contrasting recent events spring to mind: in April 2022, photojournalist and climate activist Wynn Alan Bruce self-immolated on the steps of the US Supreme Court. A year earlier, in May 2021, the Dutch citizens’ organisation Milieudefensie won its court battle against Royal Dutch Shell at the District Court of The Hague. The court found against the oil company for historic environmental harm, and ordered a reduction in its carbon emissions.
The case against Shell is still ongoing, on appeal. But the damage to the corporation’s reputation in the Netherlands was considerable: after the judgement, the company was compelled to relocate its headquarters to London, incorporating as a British company. Before the court’s judgement was handed down, the legal battle was already being dramatised, as a play titled De zaak Shell (“The Shell Trial”) by Anoek Nuyens and Rebekka de Wit, first performed in 2020. It has now been refashioned as an opera, premiering in March this year at Dutch National Opera.
Co-adapted and directed by brother-sister team of Gable and Romy Roelofsen, the opera’s music has been written by the US composer Ellen Reid, with a libretto by Roxie Perkins, with whom Reid collaborated on her previous opera Prism, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 2019. The Shell Trial itself might be closer to an oratorio, its characters being not specific individuals, but rather archetypical figures: the ensemble cast includes Lauren Michelle as The Law and The Artist, Audun Iversen as The CEO, and Claire Barnett-Jones as The Government, amongst others.
Courts continue to be places of contestation for the huge ramifications of the climate crisis. But while the initial dramatic framing is one of a courtroom, this is not only a courtroom drama. “Courtrooms are so much about power relations, which is of course what opera is about too,” Romy Roelofsen says, speaking by video call from Amsterdam. “But it might also be a place of the imagination.” The drama develops in multiple directions via a series of solo arias, duets, trios and ensemble choral moments.
Courtrooms are relatively rare in opera, but they are nevertheless vital spaces “where we can check our shared reality,” Gable says. “The climate crisis can leave people feeling powerless, but in such spaces people can gain power too.” The circumstances of the court can enable a change in what is understood to be possible. “Citizens coming together, empowering themselves, realising that they have power, rather than leaving it all to governments. It’s an imaginative space: change starts with imagining different ways of living together, and how systems can be different.”
It’s perhaps no accident that such a production would be mounted by a Dutch opera house, based on a court case held in The Hague, the home of international law. To dramatise such proceedings is especially resonant given the world’s eyes recently focused on South Africa’s case against Israel before the ICJ in The Hague.
“Anoek and Rebekka, the writers of the original play, did several things,” Gable says. “They did three years of research. They bought shares of Shell, and they were also among the 20,000 citizens of Milieudefensie that brought the court case in the first place.” It was a combination of qualities that Gable found attractive: “they married research and journalistic skills, becoming shareholders, and being in the courtroom, together with artistic skills. Their ability to work in different fields, and with different skills, I found very inspiring.”
The opera has inherited much of the original production’s confrontational energy. “When we were first in talks with the opera house,” Gable tells me, “we were proposing a site-specific location in the harbour, that was related to Shell. But after speaking with the director of the opera house, we decided that we had to do it on the main stage – in front of our subscribers and their grandchildren.”
For the Roelofsens, the subject matter has personal resonances too. “Romy and I, and also our music director and co-creator Manoj Kamps, all have a colonial background. Manoj is from Sri Lanka, and Romy and I have Dutch-Indonesian descent. While people frequently think about the climate crisis as something affecting the future, its origins stretch deep into the past. We had been reading some amazing writing by Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse, emphasising how extraction of resources from the Global South has brought us here in the first place.”
This resonance is present also for the cast. “The role of The Historian will be sung by the amazing contralto Jasmine White, who is indigenous American (and non-binary besides)”, Gable tells me. “They told us about their experiences fighting against a pipeline in the area they grew up in,” in Oklahoma. “We’ve tried to find a lot of performers who are to some extent code switchers – both immersed in classical operatic language, but also open to other ways of using the voice, having worked in contemporary music.”
“This whole project is bridging a lot of worlds,” Gable says. This chimes, too, with the way that Ellen Reid describes the music, when we speak separately. “People can expect to experience a whole spectrum of sound: between something that’s rich and warm and rooted in operatic melisma. And from there to somewhere more edgy, that has extended techniques, sul pont strings, a harder, noisier, metallic edge that feels close to the rage that people feel when we start thinking about this issue.”
“Ellen is brilliant at writing very sensitively, in her orchestration, but she can move from there to somewhere very visceral, which of course is needed with such a topic,” Romy Roelofsen says. “In her last opera, she was really great creating an alienating effect in a very beautiful way,” Gable adds. “We move from beautiful vocal music, that slowly distorts, and then crackles and breaks, and her background in noise and sound art begin to show through. She’s a sort of remixer on the page.”
Reid was reluctant to give too much away about specific details of the opera’s twists and turns, especially when it came to the conclusion. But one significant difference from the original play is the addition of a children’s chorus. “The writers of the original play had a dream that it should end with a choir of children. That never happened,” Gable says. “We felt it was very important to give children the last word in this piece. That the piece presents both hope, but also danger, of the endless repetition of the same systems.”
“They are the climate survivors,” Romy says, “but they are also something like the vessels of the past, the present, and the future – and they give voice to those that were harmed by Shell’s colonial roots. Of course, they’re present-day kids...” “But it was important for Manoj and us that we would not work with a ‘normal’ children’s choir,” Gable adds. “Rather they are a reflection of the city of Amsterdam, a group we have worked for the last few months to build. A choir that reflects the history of the city, which has been capitalist for 500 years, and which has such an intimate relationship to the Global South.”
The project has been important for DNO too, to demonstrate that opera productions can be achieved with ecological awareness. “This isn’t a production that is about big operatic scenery,” Gable says. “What scenery we do have is constructed from 80% recycled material.” DNO is also offsetting emissions associated with the production through contributions to two forest sustainability projects, in Brabant, Netherlands, and in the Borneo rainforest. To do so has a freighted pregnancy, given Shell’s history of exploitation of the Dutch East Indies.
All of this adds up to a production that aims to artistically re-imagine our emotional connections to climate crisis – and what is possible for ordinary people confronted by it. “We hope this project is a sort of Trojan horse,” Gable says, with a wry smile.
The Shell Trial runs at Dutch National Opera from 16th to 21st March.
This article has been edited after publication to amend the wording of a quote from Gable Roelofsen.
This article was sponsored by Dutch National Opera.
