Clemency – Guardian Review

by Tim Ashley
Sunday 8 May 2011 18.00 BST

Adam Green, Eamonn Mulhall and Andrew Tortise
Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Clemency, James MacMillan's new opera for five singers and string orchestra, is about "vengeance and mercy", according to its librettist, Michael Symmons Roberts. A co-production between ROH2 and Scottish Opera, it's a religious work that examines the inscrutable nature of divine justice by recasting part of the book of Genesis in contemporary terms.

Abraham offers hospitality to three mysterious, angelic Triplets, who prophesy that his wife Sarah, who is ageing and childless, will have a son within a year. The Triplets are also bent, however, on the vengeful destruction of the "twin towns" that stand nearby. Abraham is soon pleading with them, in vain, to spare the towns if they can be found to contain five people who are "good in heart and mind".

There are problems with some of this. The words "twin towns", with their overtones of twin towers, raise provocative implications of terrorism, though the programme notes tell us that some sort of vigilante action is what is intended. The towns, meanwhile, are a latter-day Sodom and Gomorrah: distancing themselves from a narrative responsible for centuries of homophobia, MacMillan and Symmons Roberts reimagine them as the centre of a dictatorship predicated on torture and injustice.

The text is opaque, at times esoteric. Symmons Roberts indulges in overload: "My destiny is played out on its wall of pearl" is a typical line. Parts of it are in what I took to be Hebrew and/or Aramaic, but we're offered no guidance as to their meaning. The score, however, has some attractive moments, though there's a bit too much consciously ecstatic string writing in the tradition of Tippett's Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli. Sarah has a striking central aria. The Triplets sing in close harmony that broadens into suave polyphony with overtones of Palestrina.

It's well done. There's shapely playing from the Britten Sinfonia under Clark Rundell. Janis Kelly registers Sarah's "gratitude and terror" towards God in a performance of considerable power. Grant Doyle is her bewildered, angry Abraham, while Adam Green, Eamonn Mulhall and Andrew Tortise are curiously seductive as the Triplets.

Katie Mitchell's modern-dress production contains the action in a framed three-part set that resembles a triptych, and ingeniously offers multiple perspectives on the same series of rooms. There are some clever touches, with the Triplets arriving dressed as workmen, but departing for Sodom in suits, Reservoir Dogs-style. Mitchell wisely plays most of it straight, though: some of it is simply too dense to warrant interpretative interference.

Original review link here.