Easy to give this a miss. At 55 minutes only one third of Il trittico, and the less loved middle sibling at that, this Suor Angelica was trailed by English National Opera as semi-staged and given for a single night in an English translation rather than the original Italian. It must have been a hard sell.
In the event we should pity those who swerved, because in a year of inspired directorial brainwaves Annilese Miskimmon’s production is up there with WNO’s Death in Venice. The simple act of updating this harrowing tale of abuse from 17th-century Italy to 1960s Ireland confronted the audience with the human suffering of women whose shame (as perceived by the Catholic Church) led to their incarceration into slave labour at the genteelly named Magdalene Laundries.
By happenstance, Sir David McVicar trod a similar path in his recent Scottish Opera Trittico (currently being revived by Welsh National Opera) in which a comparable plight infused his Suor Angelica, although in his case the Magdalene connection was implied rather than spelt out. It's a happy coincidence, because an event from recent history that brought such disgrace on a church and a nation (the shame was entirely theirs, not that of the unfortunate victims, as both have since acknowledged) is surely ripe for re-examination as an historical event. The parallels between religious hypocrisies three centuries apart show that intolerance is as insidious as fascism and can flare up at any time.
Suor Angelica can be hard to like. Puccini concocted a cloying, sentimental piece of audience manipulation, one that usually strikes this viewer as oozing a cheaply-bought cynicism. Miskimmon’s staging has converted me, if not to the work itself then to its potential to move the spectator in a production that blends sensitive stagecraft and directorial rage. The relocation to Ireland was unsparing in its evocation not of some tearjerking melodrama but of an almost documentary reportage on real events.
Amanda Holden’s translation was a model of its kind: terse, idiomatic and musically aware. The stark designs by Yannis Thavoris, far from semi-staged, framed a concept whose realism was discomfiting from the outset, with desperate young women heavily pregnant and in need of loving comfort while unloved babies were wheeled away to an unspecified fate. When, through the exchange with her aunt La Zia Principessa (here called the Baroness) Sister Angelica learns that her own illegitimate child has been dead for two years without her knowledge, the action was transfigured from maudlin sentiment to shattering grief through her own daily acquaintance with similar tragedies.
At this point a woman behind me could take it no more and excused herself, weeping, from the auditorium. She had no need to apologise. To witness this tale in isolation, shorn of its theatrical partners Il tabarro and Gianni Schicchi, was disturbing. It was rendered all the more powerful by a towering performance in the title role from Sinéad Campbell-Wallace and an ice-cold réplique by Christine Rice as the Baroness. Their singing was outstanding, their acting majestic. Campbell-Wallace inhabited Angelica’s collapse into grief-ridden suicide with forensic empathy; the vision of her dead child, corporeal and playful, was her dying dream of what might have been had he lived.
The English National Opera Orchestra played Puccini’s score superbly under the eloquent baton of Corinne Niemeyer, while a selection of the ENO Chorus together with some distinguished solo singers completed an impeccable all-female company. Miskimmon, for her part, delivered her theatrical fulmination with unblinking power. She challenged us to confront the truth even as we longed to look away.
