BACKSTAGE WITH… Composer Iain Bell
Your new opera, Jack the Ripper: The Women of Whitechapel, is being premiered this month. How biographical is it?
Within the tales of Jack the Ripper, I found it frustrating that the murderer himself had achieved a sort of legendary status, while his female victims were faceless and only defined by his acts. We know very little biographical detail about the women themselves, but there was a great deal of social writing at the time about the conditions they were living in and what they had to go through, so we’ve weaved this all together.
So the women are the focus of your story?
Yes, completely – Jack the Ripper doesn’t appear at all. We’re giving the female characters the chance to tell the collective story of the women of Whitechapel. One in four women in this area had to work as prostitutes at one time or another, and had to be so strong and defiant, going out on the streets in spite of all the murders. We didn’t want to write a ‘whodunnit’, because that’s a part of the canon that’s been exhausted. It was more interesting to see what was happening in the community.
What effect does writing about real-life events have on your work?
It doesn’t really influence me whether the character I’m writing for is based on fact or fiction. What’s important to me is that they have their own truth – be that literal or imposed via a fictional narrative. The character just needs to be portrayed as three-dimensionally as possible.