The Royal Opera’s latest new work is, as its director Katie Mitchell describes it, perhaps more an installation than an opera. Exploring “the fragmentation of the female psyche after sexual violence”, in music by Laura Bowler and words by Laura Lomas, The Blue Woman in some ways recalls New Dark Age, the sequence by female composers that the Royal Opera put on its main stage in October 2020, also directed by Mitchell, with Grant Gee’s videos similarly drawing focus.
Eight women face us within blue walls: four singers in front, four cellists behind. The upper half of the stage is a long screen showing Gee’s film of a ninth woman, played silently by Eve Ponsonby. We see her within the bare walls of an abandoned tower-block flat, or writhing as if trapped in the confines of the screen, or taking a train, stepping down to the riverfront, walking through the city. From the lines of Lomas’s tersely poetic libretto, it seems that she is searching for the person she used to be before trauma hollowed her out. The singers who deliver those lines might be four individuals sharing similar experiences, or four versions of the same person.
