A mother mourns for her dead child. Refusing to allow his body to be cremated, she is offered the possibility of a miracle – find a truly happy person before the end of the day and cut a button from their sleeve, and the child will be restored to life. Given an itinerary, a list of those who might really be happy, the unnamed woman sets off on her quest. Picture a day like this, George Benjamin’s fourth opera, and like its predecessors a collaboration with the dramatist Martin Crimp, has the feel of a modern fairytale, closer to the timeless, magical world of Benjamin and Crimp’s first stage work together Into the Little Hill, a retelling of the story of the Pied Piper, than to the troubling medieval cruelty of the two larger-scale works that followed, Written on Skin and Lessons in Love and Violence.
Crimp’s sources this time were a mix of European and Buddhist folk tales, and an ancient near-eastern romance, but the woman’s search is couched in thoroughly modern imagery. It turns out to be increasingly futile: the “happiness” of all those she encounters – a pair of lovers, an artisan craftsman, a composer, a wealthy collector – proves to be illusory or compromised, until finally, in a beautiful, tranquil garden, she meets Zabelle, a woman very like herself, and realises what her way forward might be.
