Angel's Bone
- Robert Beale
- May 13
- 4 min read
Royce Vavrek and Du Yun
English National Opera with the BBC Philharmonic and Kantos Chamber Choir
Aviva Studios, Manchester
May 12-16, 2026: 1 hr 20 mins
(Further performances on May 14, 15 at 7.45pm and May 16 at 2pm)
The big issue with this production of Angel's Bone is its attitude towards its audience. They (in most cases) must stand for the whole time, and even then it’s deliberately designed so they don’t see much by direct line of sight.
This is the UK premiere, and director Kip Williams (whose UK opera debut this is), designer Marg Horwell and their team offer it as a technically highly-mediated experience.
There are four giant screens, suspended around a central, slowly revolving turntable where the action takes place, which are the vehicle for real-time, hand-held camerawork by three people, who are on the set along with the singers.
This is immersive performance of a kind in which Aviva Studios specialises, seen in other forms in theatre works there, but probably never so comprehensively used as here.
The “stages” assembled for the opera’s successive scenes are like a three-dimensional, single-storey house, and what you miss in direct vision is supplied by the screens. I was lucky enough to be given a seat in the limited viewing area for those who didn’t feel able to stand for the whole show, but what it was like for those who were on their feet is another matter.
Vavrek tells the story of a seemingly everyday husband and wife, at odds with each other: “This is not the dream that you promised me,” she tells him. “I need you to…” But one day they are surprised to find two young angels, complete with wings, in their compost heap. They are “runaway children”, he says – with some insight. At first the angels appeal for help and the husband tells them: “This is your haven”… but his wife has other ideas. Before long the two of them have decided to exploit their “good fortune”, and, having literally clipped the wings of their guests, decide “Let us reap their magic, their beauty”. It’s almost a Paradise Lost event, not because of angelic pride but human greed.
What follows is described in the creators’ and publicists’ words as a parable of people trafficking and modern slavery, but the striking thing to me was the parallel with today’s American, TV-fuelled religiosity. The couple keep the young angels at home, confined to a bathtub, but go on TV and tell the viewers: “They will do anything, bless anything…” The big selling point, as they begin to reel in donations from the gullible, is that blessings can be bought.
Of course it all goes pear-shaped in the end, and the angels end up “battered, bruised, beaten…”, while the couple are back to square one – except that she is pregnant with the male angel’s child (“…a little cherub flutters in my womb”).
The chorus, which has been commentating Greek tragedy-style on each event as it ensues, repeats a mantra that “Feathers are prickly things”, and while the remorseful husband flagellates himself to oblivion, our mercenary wife decides to exploit her story of “a man who forced his wife to pimp” and is back in televangelist mode with a promise that her child will “bring so many blessings…” After that it ends, with a massive musical crescendo.
The musical team brought together for this production is remarkable. Principally, Allison Cook as the scheming but vulnerable wife has some very wide-ranging tessitura to negotiate, as well as a huge gamut of emotion, which she does with great skill. She sings with a very English-sounding diction, while Rodney Earl Clarke, as her husband, keeps himself American (I suppose this is to universalise the story), and their power and emotive qualities are well matched.
Mariam Wallentin, as the Girl Angel, and Matthew McKinney, as the Boy Angel, are effective singing actors in what – bathtub-confined much of the time – are physically confined circumstances. And male soprano Keith Pun, who often sings with the chorus as a kind of archangel, has a lovely pure and near-unearthly quality.
Kantos Chamber Choir, Manchester’s own, is extraordinarily good: not only do the members sing some tricky music, often in motion, while maintaining balance and tonal quality, but also act as subsidiary characters in the story, and at several points have solo roles to undertake. One in particular who stood out was Camilla Seale, a rich mezzo, who represented a member of the public who – crucially – is disappointed by not receiving the “blessings” promised from contact with the captive angels (“I have called but you don’t answer…”).
The 10 musicians of the BBC Philharmonic do sterling stuff under the baton of Baldur Bronnimann, whose control of many moving elements in the production is exemplary.
More info and tickets here
