Religious right dystopia rules in Margaret Atwood’s mid-1980s The Handmaid’s Tale. “The war is going well. Praise be.” Reading the political runes of the last few years, it is a timely revival, two years only since Annelise Miskimmon’s ENO production premièred: Trump, Putin, Ukraine, Iran, the Middle East… the (Anti) Arts Council dictating ENO’s future.
A strike by the Musician’s Union planned for the first night was stood down, but here they are in the street handing out flyers. Hope springs eternal. It has to.
But has the world gone mad? It seems so in the pornographic, puritan, patriarchal Republic of Gilead. The President and all of Congress have been assassinated after climate and demographic crises, and possibly nuclear, too, radiation clearing a terminal punishment for rebels. Life is an oppressive punishment for surrogate childbearing women, the Biblical handmaids of the title.
Two acts, eighty and sixty minutes respectively, are a shocking watch, the primitive regressive politics, former freedoms cancelled, arena executions, Aunties with cattle prods, collective violence, a police state… and the Wall. In the novel, the Wall is where hanged opponents are left as a visual deterrent; here it looks like an ancient wall of remembrance, not quite the same thing. I wonder about the photos.
It’s a drab place, 1950s drab: with their limited produce, the shops (Annemarie Woods’s design) remind me of a shabby Soviet Union. There are automated praying slot machines—pick any dystopian film or novel, set in the past or future, a mishmash of styles. Poul Ruders’s score, disquieting, energising, lush, jazzy and enthralling in its complexity, is also a fusion of influences present and past (he acknowledges Berg, Strauss, Puccini), minimalism, medieval chants and “Amazing Grace”.
Some hear Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Messiaen, my companion hears Britten—something for everybody, it hits the solar plexus with unnerving acuity. In the programme interview, Ruders talks of the impact Penderecki’s 1961 Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima had on him.
Paul Bentley’s libretto follows Atwood’s prescient tale with a clarity brought to graphic life (colour defined groups, establishing pecking order) by the singers, especially by mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey (Offred), the fulcrum and star of the tale—it is Offred’s story after all. Words matter—“not freedom to but freedom from”; “not a prison but a privilege”—double speak, a Salem, a gulag for some.
Frustratingly, we don’t know what happens to her in the end, but we do know that Gilead is over. How? The tale is framed by The Twelfth Symposium on the Republic of Gilead (formerly the United States of America) in 2195.
A white-suited Juliet Stevenson as Professor Pieixoto presents the discovery of Offred’s fragmentary audio cassettes, some taped over (Madonna, the Grateful Dead), which she handles with gloves as precious relics of the twentieth century. There is some humour to leaven the horror, and Vogue and Scrabble (Gilead Commandments forbid reading and writing). And easily decipherable joke Latin.
Time puts everything in its place—is this all we can hope for? Lindsey dominates the evening in splendid company: the cast is almost the same as two years ago. The newbies in lead roles are tenor Zwakele Tshabalala (so good in Blue) as chauffeur Nick the Eye (Eyes everywhere), soprano Rachel Nicholls as Aunt Lydia, soprano Nadine Benjamin (also in Blue and 7 Deaths of Maria Callas) outstanding as the rebellious Moira.
Akhila Krishnan’s video design (old black and white film projections of the past and Offred’s feminist mother, a small role for mezzo Susan Bickley) knit two disparate periods, the before and after—hard-won women’s rights count for nothing in Gilead. It is female subjugation, penal servitude and numbness. It makes one’s flesh crawl (the music helps)—what humanity is capable of. “We thought we’d do better”, says the Commandant. Hmm… privileged men with access to the Jezebel brothel.
Rulers blind us with fear, confusion and lies. It is coming to pass again, this horrific tale of surrogate slavery, children stolen (Putin in Ukraine), life expendable to serve the Commander (bass James Creswell) and his evangelical wife Serena Joy (Avery Amereau a beautiful soft contralto whose voice wrong foots expectations), a harsh puritanical woman who will stoop at nothing to have Offred bear a child.
We don't seem to have heeded Atwood, who throws everything in her armoury at it—numbers tattooed on arms, euthanasia for imperfect babies—but then prophets are never listened to in their time—the book was written forty years ago.
When the gruelling words, sung and acted so dramatically by the entire cast, become too much, let the music do the talking. Conducted with vigour by Joanna Carneiro, this is why I had to see and hear it again. I sit near the orchestra and get the full impact.