Hugely admired in the US after its first performance at the Glimmerglass festival in 2019, Jeanine Tesori’s powerful Blue gets its UK premiere at English National Opera in a production by Tinuke Craig, conducted by Matthew Kofi Waldren. Setting a text by Tazewell Thompson, it’s an angry but lyrical work that deals unflinchingly with the impact of racial discrimination, police brutality and racially motivated violence on a Black family in present day Harlem. The narrative is horribly and tragically familiar.
Tazewell’s relatively straightforward dramatic premise brings complex emotional resonances in its wake. At the work’s centre is the murder, at a peaceful protest, of a Black policeman’s son by one of his father’s white colleagues, an act that is never shown, though we witness the events that surround it. Around the time of his birth, the boy’s mother and her friends worry about his future in a prejudiced world, and years later we find father and son locked in ideological conflict over the former’s job. After the murder, there is only grief, as a painful confrontation between the father and the Reverend who fails to console him leads us to the son’s funeral. There are no easy answers to anything we have seen, and at the end an epilogue takes us back to what, we gradually realise, was the family’s last meal together.
