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Talise Trevigne (foreground) awaits judgment from Toby Farrow |
An opera that thrives on silence
SILENT TWINS
Almeida Theatre
CONFOUNDING the notion that opera must be all sound and fury, this latest addition to the Almeida’s summer opera season, about June and Jennifer Gibbons (played by Talise Trevigne and Alison Crookendale), is a stark and poised production.
Based on the book by Marjorie Wallace about the real-life crimes of the Gibbons sisters during the early 1980s, writer April de Angelis has crafted a fine and delicate study of this enigmatic relationship, contrasting the “glorious but sad paradox” of their public silence with their noisy, colourful imaginative life.
The staging is excellent, the revolving frame of a cube providing an effective canvas for the various shifts in time and space, as well as the transitions from reality to fiction.
Opening with ultrasound images projected onto white cloth and followed by images of bucolic bliss as the twins grow up, the action soon moves to the cold light of courtroom judgment and condemnation, the diagnosis of the twins’ psychotic disorder and their incarceration in Broadmoor – the latter evoked by uneasy harpsichords and the doom-laden throb of electric bass.
Errollyn Wallen’s music incorporates elements of jazz and even disco as it warmly evokes the ill-judged forays into literature the twins made.
The singing is very good (though sometimes a little quiet) just as conductor Tim Murray ensures that the music underscores the action so that the drama can breathe.
The performances of Trevigne and Crookendale are deliberately understated, the former more overtly maniacal with an evil glint in her eye, but the latter the dominant force in the relationship, as she clasps her hand over her sisters mouth when they are being sentenced, and happily loses her virginity in a church while her sister stops herself going that far.
It is these central performances of characters improved and diminished, created and destroyed by one another, which stays in the mind.
Jennifer’s death at the conclusion subverts the natural order, June tenderly holding her arm in support but soon tossing it away as her sister breathes her last.
Their silence is the tension off which the opera thrives, and a wonderfully considered and well-wrought production has been created around it.
Until July 16
020 7359 4404 |
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