'Angel's Bone' review — this Pulitzer Prize-winning opera is a challenging portrait of abuse and depravity

Read our review of Angel's Bone, now in performances at the London Coliseum to 31 October.

Summary

• English National Opera stage Angel's Bone at the London Coliseum
• Du Yun’s Pulitzer Prize-winning challenging work examines abuse and human trafficking
• Kip Williams's production is part opera, part art installation
• Mariam Wallentin and Matthew McKinney effectively convey the angels' vulnerability and fear

With pre-show content warnings longer than the cast list, Du Yun’s 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winning opera, Angel’s Bone, is not an easy watch. Focusing on abuse and human trafficking, it is an allegorical tale shining a stark light on the potential depravity of the human race and challenging the audience not to look away.

Two angels fall to earth and are discovered by Mr and Mrs X. E. The couple’s crumbling marriage and financial worries are immediately subverted by the realisation that they can exploit the angels for fame and fortune, leading to horrifying physical and psychological abuse.

Making his opera debut, director Kip Williams’s production is part opera, part art installation. In keeping with his style, three camera operators film events and project the footage onto giant screens. One screen provides the backdrop, covering the entire back of the stage, with another spilt screen that slowly rises and falls at the front. As with much of Williams’s work, the visual stimulation is intense and will be overwhelming for some.

Williams also continues his collaboration with designer Marg Horwell who uses a large revolve upon which a whole house is cleverly constructed, then deconstructed, during the course of the opera. This creates a distinctly voyeuristic atmosphere, all the more disquieting for the audience combined with Jack Knowles’s starkly bright lighting design.

The first act of tearing the feathers from the Angels’s bloody wings is viscerally raw and quickly ramps up to a dark orgy-like party where Mr and Mrs X. E. sell sessions with the angels, leading to horrific violence and explicit sexual abuse. Williams forces the audience to become increasingly uncomfortable watching these scenes. The motivation is to confront the realities contained within the fantasy scenario on stage, but it often becomes too much. A later scene shows Mrs X. E. (now heavily pregnant with the Boy Angel’s child) parading on talk shows and posing for selfies, which feels too obvious as a piece of social commentary.

Cross-genre artist Mariam Wallentin makes her ENO debut as Girl Angel, with Matthew McKinney as Boy Angel. Both show huge vulnerability and palpable fear at their increasingly desperate situation, with some beautifully delicate vocals, particularly from McKinney. Hong Kong countertenor Keith Pun is ethereal as the Male Soprano, who watches over the fallen Angels with increasing anguish.

As Mrs X. E., Allison Cook conveys intensity and pure evil in her rampant need for both money and power, with striking use of her powerful mezzo, while Rodney Earl Clarke has flashes of humanity as her downtrodden husband. They have able support from Kantos Chamber Choir, who appear as a company of angels and then the couple’s dead-eyed and malevolent customers.

Du Yun’s eclectic composition ranges from chamber music to jazz and electronica, with frequent unsettling, discordant tones. It is a wide and constantly changing assortment of music and Baldur Brönnimann conducts the ENO Orchestra with great versatility. Weaker is Royce Vavrek’s libretto, which is often repetitive and does not provide sufficient character development.

Credit must be given to English National Opera for choosing to stage such a challenging show. There is no doubt it is a compelling production, if not exactly an enjoyable one.

Angel's Bone is at the London Coliseum to 31 October. Book Angel's Bone tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: Angel's Bone (Photos by Nirah Sanghani, Tristram Kenton)