Blanche                Ksenia Eremina Jones
Marquis de la Force    Benjamin Lake
Chevalier de la Force  Felipe Nieto Caldera
Thierry                Peter Willcock
Old Prioress           Edel O'Brien
New Prioress           Claire Pendleton
Mother Marie           Shona Allen
Constance              Nicola Ledwidge
Confessor              Stephen Bloy
Commissioner           Andrew Hernadez Salazar

Conductor              Andrea Quinn
Director               Kresimir Dolencic

Trinity Opera Group and Symphony Orchestra

I'm afraid I normally can't do nuns. At my Ursuline school, we thought The
wreck of the Deutschland was a comic poem. So I was uncertain whether to
see this tonight, especially as Trinity seemed to bite off a little more
than they could chew with the somewhat similar Beatrice Cenci last year and
there's a production of Dialogues of the Carmelites at the ENO later this
year (if they can raise the money). But, somewhat as with Beatrice Cenci,
this was an effective production of a wrenchingly powerful work whose
dramatic impact made up for a few vocal shortcomings.

Based on a screenplay, the Dialogues of the Carmetlites has an
impressionistic rhythm. Scenes begin in mid-conversation and conversations
occur without obvious location. The music is similar to movie music, a
fluid, narrative- and character-driven blend of post-Romanticism and
pastiche or reinvented liturgical music. There are some light touches, for
example, the "baroque" introduction to act two, but there is no sign of
Poulenc's pre-conversion triviality. Nor (thank God) is there any sign of
the proto-happy-clappy cheerleading of his Gloria. The horrific ending, in
which the nuns one by one stop singing the Salve Regina and step up to the
guillotine, seemed to verge tonight on white noise punctuated by the
rhythmic swish of the blade.

This is the last production that will take place in the Spitalfields Market
Opera. The building, built with lottery money but always with only a
temporary lease on its site, is to be demolished to allow for development
in the market. This is sad, as it's in many ways a good venue for Trinity,
and for other smallish productions. But this performance highlighted the
space's problems. There's no pit, and the large orchestra was squeezed down
one side of the raised set. And the unforgiving space meant that the
singers were both exposed and often incomprehensible, even though they were
singing in English.

But the production itself was spare and powerful. A fixed set consisting of
a platform two-thirds the width of the theatre, with various raised blocks
and stairs, provided a variety of locations by means of lighting. The
costumes were conventionally in period. The nuns wore various shades of
brown and cream linen that looked a bit too Liberty's, but had an austere
elegance. There was no guillotine. When each nun stopped singing, she
walked upstage and turned behind a curtain, to reappear without her scarf
and with her hands untied in a white light downstage. (The production
didn't run to wigs. The final tableau looked like a Movida colour chart --
the performer's hairstyles were not quite what you'd expect on nuns, even
in martyred bliss.)

Ksenia Ermina Jones as Blanche did some good screams, but her hysterics
were more like chorus-girl squeaks. She didn't really come over as a woman
on the edge of madness, tormented with both personal and theological
insecurity. But she sang her difficult music confidently. And she had the
nun's simper exactly right. Nicola Ledwidge, though not particularly
musical as Constance, was dramatically delightful. She was gawky and
cheerful, but managed to convey Constance's childlike spirituality, and in
the end was very touching indeed. Shona Allen was a forceful Mother Marie,
always herself with a touch of repressed hysteria until her total,
convincing collapse at the end when she accepts that her burden is not to
suffer martyrdom. Edel O'Brien was striking as the old Prioress, singing
powerfully and dramatically.

Andrea Quinn and the Trinity Symphony Orchestra beat the echo in the
theatre and delivered a lot of affecting detail as well as the dramatic
sweep of the music. They couldn't avoid drowning the singers at times,
unfortunately. The problem wasn't the singers' lack of volume -- the nuns'
unaccompanied prayers were intensely beautiful and resonant.

Of course, it's not about nuns. Dialogues of the Carmelites is, like the
Trojan Women, about people who are powerless but can or will not compromise
their sense of integrity when they are on the losing side in a conflict.
The ethics and theology of martyrdom in the work are entirely Catholic, but
the nuns' decisions, particularly Mother Marie's, reflect the dilemma that
self-conscious heroism can also be a form of egoism, or despair. This is a
thoroughly operatic idea, because it creates characters who project
themselves in extremis both within the plot and to the audince. But it
carries additional anxiety in a work which was written in full knowledge of
the Holocaust.