‘The Handmaid’s Tale’: a muddled musical fable of misogyny

This dystopian 1998 opera based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel of the same name is a grim affair. The essential ingredient is the idea that in the early years of our present 21st century America succumbed to a dictatorship by right-wing religious zealots. At the time when Ms Atwood wrote her story, a theocratic, misogynistic regime was in control of Iran, and she imagines the same thing happening in the USA. The result is called the Republic of Gilead, where women are denied the right to work, possess property, or even to read and write.

In the early 1990s Elaine Padmore, director of opera at Covent Garden at the time, commissioned the Danish composer Poul Ruders to write an opera based on the novel. In order to turn an inward-looking monologue into a work for the stage, she suggested that the actor Paul Bentley should create a libretto, by which time the Taliban had taken over in Afghanistan and theocratic rule was showing clear misogyny.

Bentley’s libretto bookends the opera with a late 22nd century symposium, presided over by a female university professor, looking back on events in the early 21st century. In this new production by English National Opera’s artistic director Annilese Miskimmon, the professor, elegantly clothed in a white trouser suit, was played by the French actress Camille Cottin. The choice of a French actress for a spoken part in English is bizarre. Native French speakers tend to retain their intonation in English, and her slightly indistinct diction had me glancing at the surtitles to see what she was saying.

Following this inauspicious start the narrative seemed to lose its thread, particularly with several flashbacks showing a father and his child in Gilead being split up by thuggish officials toting AK-47s. Such cliché-ridden staging may be on the way out, but here it was nothing compared to the violence we witnessed, with two women hanged centre-stage, the beating to death of a man by the handmaids, and one female suicide by hanging. The opera depicts a very grim regime. No woman is allowed to break the bounds of chastity outside her first marriage, and second marriages are unrecognised, despite a low fertility rate and the need to procreate.

For operatic treatment this is a tough nut to crack, and Poul Ruders’ music supplies an unrelenting coldness, rarely alleviated by musical warmth. The first glow of real lyricism is when the heroine Offred, beautifully sung by Kate Lindsey, sings “What I feel is emptiness”. There are no great moments and the composer seems to have become lost in the details.

Rather than an opera, The Handmaid’s Tale is more of a fable on the emptiness of totalitarianism. With the present Russian attempt to create such a state in Ukraine, the timing of this new ENO staging is unfortunate, to say the least.

Fine singing from the chorus and principals, and Portuguese conductor Joana Carneiro kept a steady hand on the orchestral sound, but several people left early. It was an evening to be missed.

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