• Anthropocene – Scottish Opera – Review – ***

    It is a joy that Scottish Opera have once again commissioned a significant new work and included it in their main stage programme and it is unsurprising that they have turned once again to librettist Louise Welsh and composer Stuart MacRae. Their last collaboration The Devil Inside was a brilliant hit in 2016.

    This production once again looks straight into the face of all that is uncanny and disturbing and makes for an interesting though never comforting evening.

    A ship gets stuck in the ice off Greenland. It contains a rich entrepreneur and his daughter, a couple of scientists, a journalist and a couple of crew members. They get trapped due to the actions of one of the scientists who has discovered a body frozen in the ice – a body which turns out, somehow, to still be alive. This extraordinary part of the plot isn’t explored nearly as much as one would like. Though we later discover the strange survivor to have once been the victim of a cult of blood-sacrifice, the other characters seem curiously uninterested in her story other than that it might make some of them rich and famous.

    Throughout the whole opera, MacRae’s score glistens with icy melodrama – the pit seeming to become the very ice that traps the ship above it. So much does the orchestra creak and moan and shimmer throughout the whole evening that the frozen sea itself seems to have become another character in the drama.

    There was much strong singing, but it would be unfair not to single out Jennifer France singing the part of Ice – the curiously resurrected body. Her singing seemed to be what the word ethereal was coined to describe.

    This is a piece with particularly strong music for the female voice and a prolonged section for the trio of the three female singers in the second half of the evening was stunning.

    Musically, things are considerably stronger than the plot and there is a curious disjuncture between the first half of the evening and the second. It is as though the creative team were somehow subconsciously rewriting The Flying Dutchman for the first half and then when they realised what they were doing, decided to have a go at rewriting Parsifal for the second.

    Without giving away too many of the plot twists, this is a salvation story with no salvation. But therein lies its problem – this is a piece which is all too aware of its own conceit and takes us nowhere new. There are resonances here with the post-Christendom nihilism of some of Flannery O’Conner’s characters but O’Conner tells her stories with considerably more affection for the human soul.

    A number of familiar operatic clichés make appearances. Two men roll around the stage fighting one another over the affections of a woman just before the interval – though their affections come out of nowhere and disappear just as quickly. Ultimately, there is “…no blessing, no words of comfort” as Ice sings at the very end. The trouble is, we already knew that and we end the evening having been exposed more to concept than story.

    It is almost guaranteed that one will come out of a Welsh and Macrae opera talking about what it all meant and even a day later, I find myself still curiously unsure whether my opinion of it has finally settled. All I can remember looking back is being surrounded by ice and that everything around us is breaking up and is bitter cold.

    This is opera to chill you to the marrow but it neither promises nor delivers solace.

    In that, it is very much a piece of our times.

    Rating: ★★★☆☆

    This review appeared first in Scene Alba.

     

10 responses to “It was 30 years ago today…”

  1. Meg Rosenfeld Avatar
    Meg Rosenfeld

    Alas, I can’t remember exactly when it became possible for women to be come priests in the
    Episcopal Church of the United States of America, but I remember very well the first ones in our parish church in Los Gatos, California and, later, in Santa Rosa. It was a very triumphant time!

    1. Sr Alison Joy Whybrow Avatar
      Sr Alison Joy Whybrow

      The Canon in the American Episcopal Church passed in 1976 and went into effect on January 1st 1977.
      Sr Alison Joy OSB

      1. Mg Rosenfeld Avatar
        Mg Rosenfeld

        Thanks! I hope to remember those dates now.

    2. Tim Chesterton Avatar
      Tim Chesterton

      In Canada women began to be ordained as deacons in 1969 and as priests in 1976.

  2. Peggy Brewer Avatar
    Peggy Brewer

    Heartfelt testament concerning the importance/necessity of inclusion as our Lord Jesus Christ commanded!

  3. Bob King Avatar
    Bob King

    I remember the day so
    well !
    I was at Salisbury and Wells Theological College, preparing to leave to be Ordained in Hereford Cathedral, preparing for the closure of the College and praying with passion and fear that the vote in Synod would be YES 🙏🙏
    All three things happened as we know, joy and sadness mingled down.

  4. Helen King Avatar
    Helen King

    Yes, all of this, especially “There were cruelties along the way. There was a great deal of abuse along the way”

    1. Anne Avatar
      Anne

      And, sadly, there still is.

  5. John N Wall Avatar

    The first women ordained to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church were the “Philadelphia Eleven,” ordained on July 29, 1974, by three bishops who claimed that “obedience to the Spirit” justified their action. After a second ordination of women, all their ordinations were deemed by the national church to be “irregular but valid.” As a previous correspondent noted, the General Convention of the Episcopal Church officially authorized the ordination of women to the priesthood, a decision that went into effect on the first of January in 1977.

    Back to Glossary

  6. Keith Battarbee Avatar
    Keith Battarbee

    On the opposite side to the still continuing antipathies in some (diminishing) quarters to women priests : my wife, who is a priest, was driving today when we got stuck waiting our turn to join the main flow of cars. A driver in the main queue – eastern European, almost certainly – spotted my wife’s collar, crossed himself; and when we didn’t get the message, grinned broadly, crossed himself again, and waved us energetically into the traffic flow in front of him.

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