Premiered in 2000, Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking is the most performed 21st-century opera, yet, surprisingly, this co-production with Opera North and Finnish National Opera is its first full professional staging in the UK. Based on Sister Helen Prejean’s 1993 memoir of the same name, it dramatises her experiences as a spiritual advisor to a convicted murderer on death row: Joseph De Rocher (a composite character based on two men in the book).
As Prejean herself has pointed out, the work is not about capital punishment per se but a reflection on issues of truth, love, compassion, forgiveness and redemption. Yet as the opera draws to its chilling conclusion and, in Annilese Miskimmon’s searingly honest production, we hear the dying man’s ragged final breaths, it is hard not to reflect on a society in which execution by lethal injection is still a legal penalty today.
