Arctic voyage

GOOGLE the word “Anthropocene” and you’ll get a graph showing how frequently the word is used: never, until the beginning of the 21st century. That’s when it was at last clear to (almost) everybody that it was anthropos — humanity — which posed the greatest threat to our planet.

Opera is under no obligation — may even be ill-equipped — to tackle the big issues of the day, but full marks to composer Stuart MacRae and librettist Louise Welsh for making the effort. By calling their latest opera Anthropocene, they have nailed their colours to the mast: an appropriate metaphor, since that’s the name of the ship on which the action unfolds.

This, their fourth collaboration, came to Hackney as a showcase for Scottish Opera, the company that commissioned it, and whose work is too rarely seen in London.

The opera’s story finds the research vessel Anthropocene on a mission in Northern Greenland. On board is businessman Harry King, an Elon Musk-y figure who funds the expedition in the hope of enhancing his stock market value while solving the problem of polar ice melt.

For company, he has his daughter, a couple of sailors, a husband-and-wife team of scientists and a journalist on the look-out for a scoop. Cooped up in freezing temperatures, they make a volatile social mix. Sure enough, things kick off when the scientists return to the now ice-bound ship with a block of yet more ice, within which is a frozen body. It may have been there for millennia; it turns out to be a kind of Sleeping Beauty, brought back to life, perhaps, by the crackling tension around her. With amazing speed, she acquires not only a name — Ice — but also the rudiments of English, with which she attempts to resolve the on-board squabbles.

As a plotline it would make a good 30-minute episode of The Twilight Zone, but operatic narrative moves — pun fully intended — at a glacial pace. That’s inevitable when words are sung rather than spoken, but even so Anthropocene tended to dally. Lines