Tom Green’s music-theatre piece has undergone several changes since it began life as a song cycle on poems from Carol Ann Duffy’s collection, The World’s Wife. At the request of the Ragazze Quartet, Green first planned a concert work for soprano and string quartet, but that soon morphed into a theatre piece for the same combination; in that form it received its first performances under the auspices of the Welsh National Opera in 2017. Since then Green has reworked The World’s Wife for the transgender baritone Lucia Lucas, cutting one scene and adding an epilogue based on recordings of interviews with the performers and presenting it in a new staging by Jorinde Keesmaat.
Duffy’s poems give voices to the women of history, real and mythic, who have been overshadowed by their male partners, and Green sets 10 of them, including Mrs Aesop (“By Christ, he could bore for Purgatory”), Salome (“I’d done it before and doubtless I’ll do it again, sooner or later”) and Mrs Icarus (“He’s a total, utter, absolute, Grade A pillock”). The tone ranges from the absurd to the bleakly dark, from Mrs Beast entertaining her fellow fairytale characters for a poker night, to Queen Herod fearing for the life of her baby.
