© Camilla Greenwell
Composer George Benjamin and librettist Martin Crimp have already had two major successes on the main stage of the Royal Opera House. Written on Skin, which appeared at Covent Garden in 2013 and 2017, may now be the most frequently performed opera written in the twenty-first century, and it was followed by Lessons in Love and Violence in 2018. Benjamin and Crimp’s first collaboration, however, was a chamber opera entitled Into the Little Hill in 2006, and it is to this format that the pair return for Picture a Day Like This, which is presented in the Royal Opera House’s smaller venue, the Linbury Theatre.
The story focuses on an unnamed Woman whose baby dies. She is told that if she can find someone who is happy, and take a button from them, then her baby shall live once more. As she works her way through a list of potential candidates, which includes a pair of Lovers, an Artisan who used to make buttons, a Composer and a Collector, none is found to be suitably joyful. The Collector does, however, let the Woman pass into a secret garden where she meets a person named Zabelle, who seems very much like her, and whose story teaches her to see things in a new light.
Stories with this theme have existed for thousands of years. One that was popular by the nineteenth century, though it is far older, is The Happy Man’s Shirt, in which a fatally ill king is told he can be cured if he obtains the shirt of a happy man. However, the one person he finds who is sufficiently cheerful is a woodchopper so poor that he does not have a shirt. The Alexander Romance, written after 300 BCE, similarly includes a passage in which the dying Alexander the Great instructs his mother to exclude from his funeral anyone ‘who knows of past or present sorrow’, in a move less directed at controlling the guest list than at showing how happiness does not exist.
Ema Nikolovska (Woman) ROH Picture a day like this 2023 © Camilla Greenwell
Crimp was intrigued by the overall story, but did not favour the neat ending of one version or the military stoicism of the other. However, the tale of Kisā Gotamī from the Dhammapada Commentary provides a further take. It sees the Buddha tell a mother her dead child will live if she can obtain a ‘pinch of white mustard seed’ from a house that has not experienced death, only she is unable to find one. This provides a more spiritual and enlightening take on the story because, once Kisā Gotamī has accepted what has happened to her child she becomes a holy person. Crimp draws on all of these sources to create Picture a Day Like This, making the story feel contemporary and relatable, and probably as ambiguous and nuanced as any telling of it.
The opera premiered, like Written on Skin, at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in July, and a recording of it from there will become available in 2024. It represents the first time that the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, superbly conducted on this occasion by Corinna Niemeyer, has appeared in the new Linbury Theatre since it opened in 2019. The relatively small forces required for the piece permit performances on the main stage to go ahead at the same time. However, in comprising twenty-two players, the orchestra for the work is not miniscule, even if Benjamin makes the opera feel even more intimate than that number on its own might suggest. The piece actually begins with a significant period of silence as several people grace the stage (the cast includes three actors alongside five singers) before the Woman begins to sing virtually a cappella. At first just a few notes on the harp accompany her before more instruments join in, but the overall feeling throughout the piece is of a cool, measured and yet nuanced sound world, in which a certain starkness walks hand in hand with a strong sense of intimacy.
Ema Nikolovska (Woman), Cameron Shahbazi (Lover 2), Beate Mordal (Lover 1) ROH Picture a day like this 2023 © Camilla Greenwell
Although it seems obvious that each person the Woman encounters will reveal themselves to be unhappy, our interest is sustained by the fact that the way in which each does so is not that obvious. It is, for example, doubtful that anyone would anticipate in advance exactly how the Lovers will show themselves to be unhappy, and yet when it is revealed it feels like the most natural and obvious extension of their seemingly perfect situation. The production is co-directed and designed by Daniel Jeanneteau and Marie-Christine Soma, and their bare and box-like set comprises reflective panels that automatically place the action in a slightly otherworldly space. Some of the panels open to enable, for example, the bed containing the Lovers to come on, or the Composer and her Assistant to enter. The latter find themselves walking on a treadmill style floor, which provides a certain dynamism, while also suggesting how the Composer in her ridiculously busy life has to run in order to stand still. Walls protrude when the Collector explains how he has to protect himself and his possessions, but the real coup comes in portraying the garden as videographer Hicham Berrada creates all-embracing projections that make it feel akin to a coral reef.
While the opera is undoubtedly effective and moving, so much thought has gone into making different aspects feel subtle and understated that the seventy-minute long piece consequently seems just a little slight. There is one line in the garden scene that essentially reveals ‘everything’, or as much as will be revealed, and yet once it comes there is a moment in which we wonder if that was it. The overall thesis is not at fault, but the opera does perhaps seem too designed and measured as it builds to the revelation, so that when the moment comes it does not feel quite as visceral as it might. Nevertheless, with first rate, and notably versatile, performances from Ema Nikolovska as the Woman, Jacquelyn Stucker as Zabelle, Beate Mordal as Lover 1 and the Composer, Cameron Shahbazi as Lover 2 and the Composer’s Assistant, and John Brancy as the Artisan and Collector, Picture a Day Like This provides a welcome opportunity to experience Benjamin and Crimp at their most intimate.
By Sam Smith
the 27 of September, 2023 | Print
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