Feminist dystopian opera. The Royal Danish Opera’s 2022 production of The Handmaid’s Tale found fertile field in San Francisco!
In short Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel made into an opera (though first it was a movie, and later it became a television series) that imagines a world in which the barren wives of its male leaders are provided children by fertile women who are enslaved for such purpose. Its then precedent was the 1979 formation of Iran as an Islam-centric state, its current precedent is the U.S. Republican ticket (echoing Republican ideals that were already fomenting in the 1960’s, noted by Margaret Atwood).
Though Toronto based Mme. Atwood sets her novel in the United States sometime in the 2190’s, Danish composer Paul Ruders grabbed onto the novel as a great idea for an opera right now. In 1994 he enlisted British actor/writer Paul Bentley (High Septon in Game of Thrones) to create a libretto. The premiere took place in Copenhagen in 2000, (in Danish), then traveled to London’s English National Opera (2003) and then on to Toronto (2004). Meanwhile the Minnesota Opera gave the opera its U.S. premiere in 2004 in its own production. The ENO mounted its own production in 2022. Boston Lyric Opera mounted its own production in 2019. The Royal Danish Opera created a new production in 2022 that has now traveled to San Francisco.
Prestigious directors and designers have associated themselves with the opera over the years, lending it stature. If nothing else it is an important political statement, offering a ritualistic exposition of feminist issues, and a caricatured exposition of certain political goals. The opera’s U.S. setting underscores the worldwide and domestic perception that the U.S. is the world’s bogeyman.
The Handmaid’s Tale is an opera to be endured, a ritual where you may expiate at least some of the social, moral and personal pain that afflicts you — those of you who stayed until the end that is. There was noticeable attrition after the intermission of the performance I attended. Those that stayed at the end leapt to their feet.
There was much red in the clothing of women attendees at that performance, evidence of the pop solidarity of women with Mme. Atwood’s red robed handmaidens, who assembled from time to time on the War Memorial Stage, and graphically suffering (sometimes at the hands, a vista, of male gynecologists). Intermission comments overheard in the men’s room were groans of the word “heavy!”
Having endured such an evening at the War Memorial Opera House why would anyone want to go back!
San Francisco gathered many prestigious artists to sing this new Danish production in English. The primary role is a character known as Offred (I.e. assigned to Fred, who was the main male leader). Offred was sung by Irene Roberts, a veteran of many roles at SF Opera, and primarily known for her Wagnerian roles on prestigious European stages. The Ruders opera is narrative rather than lyric, Mme. Roberts delivered it beautifully — a tour de force of memory. At the bows Mme Roberts literally dove into the prompter’s box to thank the unnamed prompter.
The Offred Commander, whose name is surely Fred, was richly sung by Canadian baritone John Relyea, another singer with prestigious European credits. In The Handmaid’s Tale he proves to be sterile, thus his chauffeur Nick, sung by tenor Brenton Ryan had to strip and step in. Fred’s barren wife Serena Joy was played and richly sung by mezzo soprano Lindsay Ammann. Offred had a double to portray her life before she was forced into sexual slavery, and a husband Luke as well, plus a child (proving she was fertile), roles played by French mezzo soprano Simone McIntosh and tenor Christopher Oglesby, their child did not sing, thus is unnamed (see lead photo, the Handmaid looking on). Canadian soprano Sarah Cambidge sang Aunt Lydia, the overseer of the handmaidens, in high tessitura that exacerbated my patience for the domination of female voices.
There are 29 named roles in The Handmaid’s Tale, plus chorus, dancers and 22 supernumeraries. The San Francisco Opera Orchestra was conducted by Karen Kamensek who magisterially presided over the long narrations emanating from the stage, her orchestra in outraged sympathy (tone clusters moving melodically when it was not playing caricatures of hymns).
The production was by British stage director John Fulljames, staged in San Francisco by Lucy Bradley. British set designer Chloe Lamford created an appropriately fascistic architectural box in which hung sacrificial handmaidens, and often the Eye of Horus (the Masonic [male] Eye) that watched over every moment of this imagined world.
Michael Milenski
War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco, California, September 26, 2024.
All photos copyright Cory Weaver, courtesy of Ssn Francisco Opera.