Not Only Opera

Love it love it love it: The Monstrous Child at ROH

The Monstrous Child
Royal Opera
Linbury Theatre
Stalls E7, £25
27 February 2019
ROH page

I feel spoilt by my first new-Linbury experience. A seat in the middle of the second row, inexplicably affordable. A new opera that is as entertaining as it is musically interesting. Glorious singing. A near-troublingly slick and expensive-looking production. Will it always be like this?

I had done no research and know nothing of either composer Gavin Higgins or author Francesca Simon’s work beyond The Monstrous Child. I’m in equal parts tempted to explore and fearful that I’ve experienced the best, so harmonious is this collaboration. Higgins’s score is tempestuous and wild and fun, entirely of a piece with Simon’s dark, imaginative, engrossing story. His vocal writing is superb, encapsulating Simon’s central character, at once instantly recognizable and distinct. Together they even manage to pull a happy ending out of nowhere and (almost) make it work. This is a new opera that is original and entertaining and so much a work to be celebrated.

The production does it proud. A lead character who is half-decomposed, and a score with several powerfully expressive interludes, demands a production of confident vision. While I’m not totally convinced by all the decisions director Timothy Sheader and his team make I can’t deny their creativeness. For the story to work the heroine Hel must be monstrous and so she is, Sheader and designer Paul Wills committing to trapping their lead in an enormous pile of rancid matter. When she finally moves it is with obvious pain, dragging this horrifying carcass of herself with powerfully sympathetic bitterness.

Throughout Sheader and Wills find ways to tap into that same outlandish, painful, serious, mischievous character of Higgins’s score and Simon’s story, achieving a gesamtkunstwerk that is so impressive and unusual it’s almost difficult to know what to do with it. The exceptions are the gigantic gimmicky blocks of ice, drip drip dripping their way through Higgins’s score, there apparently for a single allusion in the libretto and so the smashing of them could fill an interlude. They look very pretty and certainly very expensive, but they perhaps assert themselves too wilfully when everything else is so tightly wound.

The success of all three branches of music, text and production rests on the performance of Marta Fontanals-Simmons as Hel, and she is stunning. On stage all the time, encumbered in a horse-sized mess of horribleness, she further captures and amplifies Simon’s creation, giving a performance of tremendous sympathy, nuance and detail. She sounds terrific, too – thanks, no doubt, in some small part to technical jiggery-pokery from the new Linbury sound system, but if the result is that I can hear every word and still revel in the beautiful sound of an excellent young singer then you’ll get no complaints from me.

By the nature of the piece Fontanals-Simmons is the stand-out performer, but she receives excellent support from all of the rest of the cast. It is a luxury to hear Tom Randle in a theatre this size, he reining it in just enough to sound blissfully sharp and edgy while still of a piece with the rest of the cast. Rosie Aldridge and Graeme Broadbent do sterling work, and Lucy Schaufer has a whale off time, spitting out words and carefully crafting a complete bit character with her usual aplomb. More of a revelation is Dan Shelvey as the love interest, a beautiful and secure tenor that is the perfect intermingler with Fontanals-Simmons’s gorgeous mezzo.

In fact, aside from the ice, the only thing that distracted me from the wonderfulness of what I was seeing was the idea that had persisted in the ROH that this was a children’s opera. Emphatically it is not, and it feels like only wishful thinking could ever have made it so. What it is is a triumph, and I dearly hope it will have a life beyond this run, and will boost the careers of everyone involved.