When a crime is extreme in its monstrosity, how far can repentance and redemption go? What of the victims’ loved ones: is it really possible to “hate the crime but not the criminal”? Can a crime be so hideous, a perpetrator so unappealing as to make compassion wrong? Dead Man Walking broaches big subjects and addresses them with depth and dramatic flair. It beggars belief that last night at English National Opera was the first fully staged UK performance of an opera written 25 years ago.
From the outset, it pulls no punches. After a brief, lyrical opening in which two teenagers cavort by a Louisiana lakeside, Jake Heggie’s music turns nasty as their brutal rape and murder by Joseph De Rocher and his unnamed brother is shown in explicit detail.
The rest of the opera depicts the weeks leading to De Rocher’s execution. Terence McNally’s libretto is masterful in its economy of means: the action may now be in the characters’ thoughts and dialogues rather than their deeds, but so tautly does McNally depict it, so expertly do both composer and librettist create the emotional ebb and flow, so skilfully does director Anneliese Miskimmon create the conditions for the singers to portray these emotions at their strongest that I defy anyone to see this opera and come out unmoved. And that applies wherever your sympathies lie. For or against the death penalty, godless or a fervent believer that Jesus will be truly penitent, or whether you think a man like De Rocher deserves even a fragment of your time, McNally steadfastly refuses to force his opinions down your throat.
The central voice is that of Sister Helen Prejean, the nun who befriends De Rocher and eventually becomes his “spiritual adviser” (and who subsequently wrote the book on which the opera is based). Christine Rice compelled completely as she led us through Sister Helen’s journey from innocence to engagement to obsession, lyrical in moments of faith, explosive in moments of stress and doubt. Her interactions with the various characters were telling, even the most minor of them sung and acted to provide rich detail: the ghastly prison chaplain, the surprisingly humane prison warden, the hostile and grief-stricken parents of the victims (a particular nod to Jacques Imbrailo as Owen Hart, the girl’s father, and Madeline Boreham as Sister Rose, Helen’s rather more worldly confidante).
Michael Mayes has been singing Joseph De Rocher for over a decade in houses from New Orleans to Tel Aviv to Madrid, gathering rave reviews along the way. He inhabits the role, a man with a big physique and a big baritone voice, a swaggering brute with few redeeming features – until Sister Helen eventually draws out the faintest glimmer of these. Dame Sarah Connolly was heartbreaking as Joseph’s mother, a woman of limited understanding who realises that she has failed her son but lacks the imagination to really know why.
Miskimmon and set designer Alex Eales give a perfect demonstration of “less is more”, with the insight that one institutional building is much like another. Convent, courtroom, prison are on a single open area with steps leading to a surrounding upper floor. A few cues distinguish them – crosses on doors, a set of bars, a lectern. Miskimmon’s direction is faultless. She throws in details without overly distracting, such as the ghosts of the two teenagers who are repeatedly present to remind you of why all this is happening.
Astonishingly in all this, there’s room for humour to shine through the bleakest of settings, never more so than on Death Row, where the guard of the coarsest crowd of heckling convicts yells, “Show some respect, she’s a f**king nun!”
Heggie’s music is the antithesis of 20th-century avant-garde. He’s not shy of pulling in popular American forms, whether gospel (he creates a hymn entitled He will gather us around to frame the opera), rock’n’roll (Joseph and Helen are both Elvis fans), jazz, Broadway or anything else. But the music for Dead Man Walking is no mere pastiche patchwork: within its overall filmic style, there are many spells of original music of brilliantly orchestrated high intensity. Conductor Kerem Hasan had his hands firmly on the reins of the ENO Orchestra, particularly adept in regulating its dynamic shifts.
There was room for nit-picking: Rice could have done with a few extra decibels, wind solos needed a touch more character, Act 2 has a fallow passage between the time that we know the inevitable and the devastating last scene. And one worries about the bank-busting scale of the production, with such a huge cast and chorus.
But overall, this is what contemporary opera should be: using the power of music to explore important themes of today in a way that cannot fail to leave you unmoved. Even with the top tiers of the Coliseum not on sale, there are many tickets available for this run. There shouldn’t be.
