This opera drains the life out of a full-blooded tale
Jack the Ripper: The Women of Whitechapel
The Ripper murders is a subject jam-packed with drama, mystery and good old gore. So how could composer Iain Bell and librettist Emma Jenkins come up with anything as soporifically slow and dreary as this? They’ve fumbled the catch, and I left the Coliseum shaking my head in rueful disbelief.
There’s nothing wrong with their concept: instead of focusing on the whodunnit question, the opera addresses the story from the
perspective of the last days of the five very poor women who were murdered and disembowelled. Nor can Bell and Jenkins be accused of pandering to clichés: worthily, they have kept all questions of Jack’s identity at bay and refrained from glamorising the material into Sweeney Todd Victorian melodrama.
But in the process they’ve drained the life out of it, presenting a meandering plot that never cumulates any sort of theatrical tension or climax: instead there’s an excess of underdeveloped characters, a lot of speechifying and breast-beating of a pseudo-feminist nature. Too much happens, and nothing happens, and oh dear, it is no fun at all.
More’s the pity, because Bell writes so fluently and lyrically for the voice and has a fine ear for orchestral sonorities (the cimbalom provides the frisson of spookiness). The music’s idiom is tonal and approachable, without sinking into pastiche: the influence of Peter Grimes is evident, both in Bell’s attempt to create the sense of a community and in the rapturous ensembles for massed sopranos. But the pace is consistently turgid, and nothing kicks or bites.
I longed for more thumping oompah-pah, more shrieking and bawling, just a hint of the raucous energy and hilarity that is the poor’s strongest weapon against misery and degradation.
But all is not lost. Daniel Kramer’s staging, rich in fog and sinister men in black circling their female prey, is enhanced by Soutra Gilmour’s setting, a dosshouse that also suggests prison and brothel and backstreet grime. It is also well served by Martyn Brabbins’s carefully calibrated conducting and a superb cast.
At 78, Josephine Barstow still has the chops and more – her portrayal of a cynical old dosshouse keeper is sharply etched and vivid. At the other end of the age scale, Natalya Romaniw, still in her 20s, proves yet again that there is world-class potential in her luscious glowing soprano: she draws some real emotion out of the attempts of the Ripper’s final victim Mary Kelly to save her daughter from prostitution.
Four other veterans – Susan Bullock, Marie Mclaughlin, Lesley Garrett and Janis Kelly all sing and act their darned stockings off as fallen women, and Kelly is particularly poignant as the drunken Polly Nichols – while a young baritone, Alex Otterburn, makes a notable Coliseum debut as kindly Squibby from the knacker’s yard. With this amount of talent going for it, Jack the Ripper could have been a real treat; alas, it just drags.