Opera for the Unknown Woman – the title alone makes my heart sink. Not one for being barracked, I lack enthusiasm for the oncoming tirade hinted at in the manifesto-like publicity statement that’s making me feel trapped already. The distilled message? If women were running the joint, the world would be in safe hands. Fine, but how heavy will the going be?
The show begins and instantly, video projection sends us hurtling through the solar system via a rear stage wall that is curved to a full width semi-circle, seemingly modelled on an IMAX cinema screen. Enhancing the flying stars and planets is a modernist, dissonant vocal score (co-composed by the production’s writer and director Melanie Wilson, with Polish composer Katarina Glowicka), that brings to mind Ligeti’s “Atmosphères”, as heard in Kubrik’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Space represented aurally by micropolyphony seems to have become the norm over the past half century, a detail enhanced by the introduction of seven disembodied female heads in the projection, as though gods looking down from the heavens, singing the perfect form as the music of the spheres.
Quite high up, central in the semicircle set, a large cylinder has been bored through. In this tube, this weather station, stands Aphra, the last woman alive in the far distant future. Aphra? A name surely worth commemorating after the first recorded professional female playwright Aphra Benn, an icon as a woman of independence. This Aphra’s imminent death will be due directly to the woeful management of the earth’s resources through the centuries. The eco system has collapsed and it’s the end of the (human) world. Would an earlier intervention have helped? Can a delegation made up of everything womankind has to offer reach out and save her now?
This delegation comes in the shape of ten international women who declaim at length their personal stories, strengths and gripes from the floor as they stand looking up at her as mitochondrial mothers, protective of their offspring as she literally reaps the whirlwind. For reasons very lengthy and ultimately unclear, they do save the day and Aphra, now changed out of her urban combats and boots into a green, flowing gown, joins her fellow women on the main stage and all is well.
An opera, according to common parlance this is not. The “work” might have garnered a more sympathetic engagement had it not associated itself with this art form. Many positive reminders about how women are legitimately half the populace but with absurdly little relative influence, and how female nature can and should be freely defined, are all good treaties to be reminded of, but ultimately return me to the oversimplified manifesto found in the publicity material paraphrased as, If women were running the joint, the world would be in safe hands.