The Handmaid’s Tale is a wake-up call for a fractured world

Annilese Miskimmon’s production of The Handmaid’s Tale at London’s Coliseum is nothing less than a triumphant two fingers to Arts Council England’s recent attempts to close English National Opera (ENO) down. Delivering original work of high quality in the less well-tilled fields of the repertoire is the company’s principal contribution to the nation’s artistic life. Here is another opera proving that artistic quality is in ENO’s genes.

A revival it may be, in the competent hands of James Hurley, a rising director with growing experience of modern operas as well as the traditional repertoire, but this Poul Ruders opera has lost none of its shock and awe. 

ENO first staged Ruders’s work in 2003, directed by Phyllida Lloyd, eventually celebrated for Mama Mia! and The Iron Lady. I did not see that production, so have no benchmark against which to measure the 2022 Miskimmon offering. 

Make no mistake. Miskimmon’s The Handmaid’s Tale is not a fun night out on the town. It is as direct, disturbing and provocative as author Margaret Atwood intended her dystopian novel to be back in the day. She first penned the tale of the post-apocalyptic male-dominated society of Gilead in 1985. 

Do not compare the opera with the television series – milked shamelessly by Hulu – about to drone on with a sixth and, deo gratias, final series in 2025. The punch of Atwood’s novel is better delivered by three hours of tightly framed plot on the operatic stage. 

The audience is drawn in from the start. A Prologue. We are welcomed, before the lights go down, as participants in a historical society symposium being held in 2195 AD, looking back at the republic of Gilead – formerly the good ‘ol US of A – which arose from the ashes of a failed society. 

It was pollution and radiation wot got them in the end. Especially when the San Andreas fault opened up, destroying California’s nuclear power stations and contaminating most of the North American continent. The birth rate plunged. 

A populist coup assassinated the President, wiped out Congress and paved the way for the establishment of the Gilead dictatorship, founded on a corrupted version of the Bible’s commandments:

Thou shalt not steal.

Thou shalt not commit adultery.

Thou shalt not commit divorce.

Thou shalt not commit abortion.

Though shalt not commit gender treachery.

Though shalt not read or write.

Though shalt not commit and manner of treason against the Republic of Gilead.

The moderator of the convention is Professor Pleixoto, of Cambridge (Mass) University, who was brilliantly portrayed by an immaculately white-suited Juliet Stevenson. She draws on a stash of recently found cassette tapes recorded at the time by the handmaid Offred to tell her story.

Handmaids were women with the potential to bear children who were living in “sin” or second marriages, forcibly removed from their families and sent to indoctrination centres presided over by “aunts”. They were then farmed out to childless households and impregnated in a chilling ritual by husbands in front of their wives. 

In this opera Offred has been allotted to the household of the Commander, Fred, and his wife, Serena Joy, a former celeb as ditsy as her contradictory name. She cannot bear children. A detailed synopsis for those unfamiliar with the plot’s details can be found here.

Immediately, the experience of the symposium is unsettling. Are we watching the history of Gilead from a safe distance, as a salutary warning against repeating history? Or, is this a justification for a society still clinging to Gilead’s commandments? Whether we are watching a Lucy Worsley take on the Tudors or a Gilead exculpation documentary is left hanging tantalisingly in the air.

Stevenson is deadpan. She would do well as a Dignitas receptionist telling potential customers that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. As she turns on the cassette player, the action unfolds. 

The stage is set in The Red Centre, represented by an eerie throng of empty red habits worn by the handmaids. That’s where the aunts go about their business.

The principal character – who recorded the tapes – is the handmaid, Offred. Of Fred. Literally, belonging to Fred. So, with all the other handmaids, Ofwarren, Ofglen … you get the drift. I would have updated the characters with an Ofboris, and perhaps an Ofdonald. But, no one sought my opinion.

Offred is a constant presence onstage. American mezzo soprano, Kate Lindsey, sang the role. Total commitment was demanded and delivered. Lindsey made the role her own with a highly charged, energetic stage presence. Her voice sings for itself. I have heard her frequently at New York’s Met. 

Danish composer Poul Ruders’s score is not exactly “singable”. Lindsey jumped every musical hurdle Ruders strewed in her path with ease. 

Ruders’ musical style is difficult to pin down. He has composed two operas with librettist Paul Bentley. The Handmaid’s Tale (1990) and Kafka’s Trial (2005). Not a peddler of joy, our Mr Ruders.

Atonal, atmospheric, with the occasional essai into lyricism exploiting traditional hymn themes at poignant moments involving children, I found his score impactful, but strangely directionless. The opportunity to pace the drama with the music was not exploited. 

I came away wishing the music had been written by someone else. Great opera. Pity about the music. Perhaps Kevin Puts, whose characters in The Hours are given a more colourful musical palette to display their emotions, would have made a better fist of it.

Ruders’s score tends to make all the characters one dimensional, especially the screeching Aunt Lydia, tasked with keeping the handmaidens brutally in their place. How English soprano, Rachel Nicholls managed to perform the vocal gymnastics demanded by Ruders seem effortless had me lost in admiration. 

Visual highlights in the set designed by Annemarie Woods were; the wall rear stage where an ever-changing display of photos of victims of the regime was mounted; the scene where the handmaids carry out an execution, hanging offenders by pulling on a large rope spanning the stage with the victim out of view stage right.

“Prayer shopping” on Vegas-style slot machines was a deft blend of the absurd and 1980’s gambling kitsch. “Oh look, I’ve got two Hail Gileads and an Our Auntie.” “Damn, I’ve only got a couple of Blessed be the fruits and one May the Lord Open”.

Offred’s past with her husband, Luke and their daughter was played out, firstly, on scratchy black and white film until the characters emerged, fully formed, onstage. The sequence when they were parted by border police as they tried to cross the Canadian border, to freedom, was occasionally looped. 

No compromise with the ritualistic horror of the sexual exploitation of the handmaids was offered. The casual indifference of the Commander, impregnating Offred while she lay prone on top of his wife, Serena Joy, is almost as shocking as are his subsequent cack-handed attempts to seduce Offred by playing scrabble, showing her fashion magazines, and escorting her to a brothel.

Written in 1985 when Atwood was living in divided Berlin, A Handmaid’s Tale is probably even more on point today. Washington Posties in the US like to point the “I told you so” finger at Donald Trump as the first Commander in Chief of a looming Gilead. 

But Atwood’s warning was wider in scope. The plight of disenfranchised women in Afghanistan; rape victims on Ukrainian battlegrounds; overweening Scottish politicians who seek to place agents of the state above parents in the guardianship of children. 

Look around. Handmaids’ Tales abound in an increasingly fractured world. This opera is a wake-up call. If we don’t heed it our children’s children’s children may be delegates at that post Gilead symposium in 2195. ENO’s opera with a true purpose. 

And Another Thing!

What is New York’s Met up to? The 24/25 season will feature an extended “black out” period from February 2025 well into March. Five weeks instead of four.

No new commissions. The proposed production of a new Semele has been shelved for a year at least.

“New” works are new only to the Met. Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, has adopted the Broadway philosophy of bringing on “off-Broadway” works tested often in the safety of the boondocks. 

The 2024-25 season will open in September with “Grounded,” which has already debuted in Washington, about the toll of drone warfare, by Jeanine Tesori and George Brant. Also modern but well-tried works; Moby-Dick, by Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer; Ainadamar, by Osvaldo Golijov and David Henry Hwang and Antony and Cleopatra, by John Adams. 

It will be the fifth opera by Adams that the Met has presented, elevating him to Tchaikovsky and Bellini status!

Some $40m has been snaffled from the Met’s endowment fund which now reputably stands at around $250m. No Wagner in 24/25. Chorus Master, Donald Palumbo, will be gone. HD broadcasts cut to eight. Can the Gelb survival plan work?

More on this when I’m on the ground in Manhattan next week.

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life