'Dead Man Walking' review — this extraordinary contemporary opera has the force of a thunderclap

Read our review of Dead Man Walking, starring Christine Rice and Michael Mayes, now in performances at the London Coliseum to 18 November.

Summary

• Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally's acclaimed opera is based on the memoir of a nun who meets with a convicted murder on death row
• Annilese Miskimmon's scorching staging is the first full professional production in the UK
• Christine Rice delivers a tremendous star turn as Sister Helen Prejean
• Michael Mayes impresses as murderer Joseph De Rocher

In an act of quite startling symmetry, the Oscar-winning actress Susan Sarandon was finishing her Old Vic engagement in Tracy Letts’s play Mary Page Marlowe on the very night that the opera version of the same story that won her that award – Dead Man Walking – was opening in triumph at the London Coliseum.

Let us hope Sarandon finds time in her schedule before returning to the US to check out the scorching production from Annilese Miskimmon. The English National Opera premiere has the force of a thunderclap and arrives capped by a tremendous star turn from Christine Rice, inheriting Sarandon’s screen role as Sister Helen Prejean.

Based on the 1993 memoir of the Louisiana-born nun, now 86, Dead Man Walking chronicles the emotional give-and-take between a Catholic sister vehemently opposed to the death penalty and the convicted murderer, Joseph De Rocher, sentenced to death by lethal injection. Those more squeamish in the audience should note that the opera hurtles unsparingly towards its horrific ending.

Never before seen in a full professional production in London, the opera feels intensely of the moment – its hot button topic no more emotive now than at the time of its San Francisco premiere 25 years ago. Indeed, one can imagine the piece landing very differently depending on precisely where this collaboration between composer Jake Heggie and the Tony-winning dramatist Terrence McNally is being performed.

Now in London, Dead Man Walking reminds us that opera can have a searing contemporaneity and that the ENO ranks with the best when on form. The production, which is presented in conjunction with Opera North and Finnish National Opera and Ballet, surprises in its immediacy. Shifting between bravura turns for the solo voice and the larger sense of a community closing in on both Sister Helen and the murderer under her watch, Miskimmon’s staging sustains a keen momentum aided along the way by Alex Eales’s monochrome, cunningly multi-purpose set.

A very different sort of presence from Susan Graham and Joyce DiDonato, both of whom have won acclaim as Sister Helen in the past, Rice immediately suggests a frailty and fallibility that make this woman of faith as psychically fretful and anxious as the bearish, burly De Rocher, whose days are numbered.

Opposites attract, sometimes in amusing ways. The two share an unanticipated affinity for Elvis Presley, whom Sister Helen saw perform live in Vegas, and they laugh in shared delight at their affection for “Jailhouse Rock”. Elsewhere, there couldn’t be a more marked contrast between the swarthy Michael Mayes – the Texan’s baritone possessed of a lustre worthy of Benjamin Britten – and the fragile-seeming Rice, who appears to crumble under the very assault to her sense of self posed by the situation at hand.

The cast of characters widens out to include a prison chaplain (the Trinidadian tenor Ronald Samm in notably rich voice) and the vaunted South African singer Jacques Imbrailo as one of a contingent of parents quick to remind Sister Helen how little she knows of what it’s like to have – and lose – a child.

Musically, one hears snatches of Gershwin and Bernstein alongside capacious surges of sound that are sent soaring into the house by the conductor Kerem Hasan, working in tandem with a dream cast. “I didn’t think I could cry anymore,” says De Rocher’s mother, here given over to no less a talent than Dame Sarah Connolly. But the achievement of the piece, and this iteration of it, is to stun an audience into silence and to land us – as the best art often does – somewhere beyond tears.

Dead Man Walking is at the London Coliseum to 18 November. Book Dead Man Walking tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: Dead Man Walking (Photos by Manuel Harlan)