Annilese Miskimmon’s English National Opera production of Suor Angelica relocates Puccini’s one-act tragedy of faith and familial cruelty from a 17th-century Florentine convent to one of Ireland’s Magdalene laundries in the 1960s. It is billed as a “semi-staged concert” and given only two performances, both on the same night. But like ENO’s other so called semi-stagings (Gloriana, Bluebeard’s Castle), it possesses a completeness, intelligence and integrity we sometimes don’t find elsewhere. It comes without the other operas of the Trittico of which it originally formed part, but is such a devastating statement it needs no accompaniment.
This transposition to a setting that saw the institutional abuse of tens of thousands of women heightens our awareness that Angelica, forced by her family into a convent after giving birth to an illegitimate son from whom she has been separated, is a victim of systems and attitudes that have persisted through history into living memory. Neither Puccini nor Miskimmon denies the altruistic validity of genuine belief, but opera and staging alike condemn its hypocritical misapplication at the service of moral absolutism, and Miskimmon works carefully outwards from the mixture of spiritual certainty and emotional turmoil that we find in the score. This is no polemic, but a staging of quiet anger and deep, pervasive sadness.
