Annilese Miskimmon’s English National Opera production of Suor Angelica relocates Puccini’s one-act tragedy of faith and familial cruelty from a 17th-century Florentine convent to one of Ireland’s Magdalene laundries in the 1960s. It is billed as a “semi-staged concert” and given only two performances, both on the same night. But like ENO’s other so called semi-stagings (Gloriana, Bluebeard’s Castle), it possesses a completeness, intelligence and integrity we sometimes don’t find elsewhere. It comes without the other operas of the Trittico of which it originally formed part, but is such a devastating statement it needs no accompaniment.
This transposition to a setting that saw the institutional abuse of tens of thousands of women heightens our awareness that Angelica, forced by her family into a convent after giving birth to an illegitimate son from whom she has been separated, is a victim of systems and attitudes that have persisted through history into living memory. Neither Puccini nor Miskimmon denies the altruistic validity of genuine belief, but opera and staging alike condemn its hypocritical misapplication at the service of moral absolutism, and Miskimmon works carefully outwards from the mixture of spiritual certainty and emotional turmoil that we find in the score. This is no polemic, but a staging of quiet anger and deep, pervasive sadness.
Pregnant women sob in fear on being admitted to the laundry-cum-workhouse, as nuns sweep past with prams containing babies taken from other mothers. Later we become hauntingly aware of the communal bonds subsequently forged between the women trapped in this living purgatory. Sinéad Campbell-Wallace’s Angelica seems a model of selfless probity, though we are soon conscious of the inner agony beneath. And when Christine Rice’s Baroness (as the Principessa has become here) eventually arrives, an embittered aristocrat in a Norman Hartnell suit (with all the establishment overtones that implies), the long-buried emotions all surge overwhelmingly to the surface. The final miracle may be a figment of Angelica’s suicidal imagination. But it also suggests the intervention of divine grace in ultimate refutation of the surrounding horror committed in God’s name.
It probably wouldn’t work half as well without its towering pair of central performances from Campbell-Wallace and Rice, great artists both. Rice’s account of her ghastly mystical communion with Angelica’s dead mother reveals a soul tormented beyond redemption. Campbell-Wallace’s voice soars upwards in unearthly pianissimos towards the heaven to which she aspires. The ensemble that surrounds them is perfect in its detail, with every character sharply etched. And in a superb house debut, it’s beautifully conducted by Corinna Niemeyer and faultlessly played.
An outstanding achievement, and it should, by right, belong in ENO’s regular repertory.
