Bushra El-Turk’s multimedia opera Woman at Point Zero is an angry yet restrained distillation of the 1975 novel of the same name by the Egyptian feminist and activist Nawal El Saadawi. Extracts from the opera, then a work in progress, were performed during the 2017 Shubbak festival, though it was only heard complete in Aix-en-Provence last year, and now it comes to London after performances in Belgium and Luxembourg. (LOD music theatre, based in Ghent, are the co-producers.) The creative team, meanwhile, are all women, and this Linbury run forms the centrepiece of this year’s Engender festival, focusing on new work by female and non-binary artists.
At the opera’s centre is an encounter between Fatma (Dima Orsho), a sex worker and activist jailed for killing an abusive pimp, and Sama (Carla Nahadi Babelegoto), a documentary film-maker interrogating the initially reluctant Fatma about her life. The tale the latter eventually tells, in which Sama sees a reflection of her own concerns, catalogues the brutalities of a patriarchal society that have fed both her desire for emancipation and the sense of individual freedom and integrity she now feels despite the confines of a prison. This all-important backstory is told with extraordinary rapidity in places, barely giving us, or indeed the characters, time for its implications to fully sink in. Hurtling momentum may have been the intention, but this feels rushed at times, and the opera’s dramatic power might have proved greater had El-Turk and librettist Stacy Hardy actually been more expansive in their treatment.
