Leonard Bernstein’s devastating double bill of raw emotion cuts to the bone

“We are only who we are: accept it. Accept and live,” writes all-American mother Dinah to those she loves most: her husband, son and daughter, a family riven with anger and desolate with grief after her apparent suicide. She believes that only by leaving the world can she bring about some sort of reconciliation between them. Leonard Bernstein’s A Quiet Place has little of the calm suggested by the title, indeed in Oliver Mears’ new production for The Royal Opera, it burns with such emotional intensity you can feel the heat pouring off the stage.

It is that failure to accept each other for what we are that lies at the core of A Quiet Place and its much earlier prequel, Trouble in Tahiti. in which Dinah and husband Sam habitually bicker and quarrel. She’s a warm, giving soul locked in a marriage with a bone-headed, emotionally-stunted macho man. They can no longer connect. Bernstein sets all this in the context of a satire on the consumerist American Dream of the 1950s, with its eager acquisition of that perfect home, car and washing machine.

A sassy close-harmony trio hymns the praises of suburbia in perky radio-advertisement style while the couple present the exact opposite of domestic bliss, their frightened little son Junior (Jonah McGovern) looking on. It’s not without its moments of comedy in Bernstein’s own libretto, but this is a couple in trouble, despite Mears’ attempt to suggest a reconciliation at the close. What’s not in doubt is the quality of the two main principals. Mezzo-soprano Wallis Giunta excelled as passionate, lonely, distraught Dinah, singing tenderly of her desire for that quiet place, a garden where she can find peace. After a lone trip to the movies she re-enacts the tacky, escapist film Trouble in Tahiti in a powerful display of despair and rage. Baritone Henry Neill as Sam managed to suggest the fragility that lay beneath the bombast and his swaggering solo – when he took out his frustration on a punchbag – was a tour de force.

But these two fine singers have to work with very little. While Annmarie Wood’s costumes are pitch-perfect for the period, there is no suggestion of the consumerist lifestyle of the 1950s in her bare, box set, other than a bed and a chair.

Bernstein’s 1953 score for Trouble in Tahiti is infused with his affection for jazz and musical theatre to such an extent that some have questioned whether it can be categorised as opera, but there can be no doubt about his much later sequel, A Quiet Life. In 1983 he was working in a totally different, more acerbic, angular style, a palette more suitable for the hard edged, truth-telling of this (partly autobiographical) continuation of the family saga.

Dinah is dead. The family, long estranged, has gathered at her funeral, with friends and other relatives. It quickly descends into chaos around the coffin. Accusations fly, insults are hurled, feelings are hurt. With Sarah Pring, Freddie Tong, Eddie Wade and Nick Pritchard among the crowd this was superb ensemble singing, carefully choreographed by Sarah Fahie.

The now much older Sam was sung with magnetic force by baritone Grant Doyle. His rejection of his son Junior, who has grown into a frightened and volatile gay young man, was painful to witness. Henry Neill, returning this time as Junior, gave a devastating performance, at once vulnerable and defiant, full of confusion and longing for the love of his father. His life is all the more complicated by his earlier love for his sister’s husband, François, a role suavely navigated by tenor Elgan Llŷr Thomas.

Junior’s sister Dede is a pivotal role in this piece. She shares his fear of their father but also sees the need for healing, leading everyone into the now neglected garden their mother loved to tend. Dede was sung with great sympathy by Rowan Pierce, her clean, bright soprano like a burst of sunshine in this now barren space. She embodied her mother’s desire that each of the family should accept the other for what they are, and build on that.

Under conductor Nicholas Chalmers, the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House excelled in the Garth Edwin Sunderland’s reduced orchestration for A Quiet Place, but rarely sounded truly convincing in Trouble in Tahiti, lacking the loose swing of a big, blousy Broadway band.