Page 445 - Aldeburgh Festival 2022 FINAL COVERAGE BOOK

It may seem like a parable about “time running out” as we race towards environmental disaster.

Perhaps it is, but the composer Tom Coult and the writer Alice Birch have ingeniously

combined the idea of mass extinction with personal emancipation. The central character, Violet,

is a woman suffering from depression whose existence up to this point — controlled by a
domineering husband — has been without meaning. She is galvanised by the impending

catastrophe into action.

This is conveyed by Birch in clipped half-sentences that Coult sets in a striking score. Superbly

played by the London Sinfonietta conducted by Andrew Gourlay, it meshes quasi-tonality with
detuned effects and extraordinary sonorities. It’s all pretty eerie, and at crucial moments that

eeriness is intensified into a soundscape of terror, matching the way that, in Jude Christian’s

focused staging, the backcloth cloudscape transforms from gentle blue and white to apocalyptic

purple and black.

Throughout you get an ominous feeling of tick-tocking time draining away. The only

miscalculation by composer and librettist is the ending, which wrenches us into a different

location and theatrical aesthetic, to make the same satirical point as that much discussed
movie Don’t Look Up.

Anna Dennis is stunning in the title role. Coult sends her leaping vocally into the stratosphere,

and she hits those notes with astonishing purity and precision while being totally credible as a

woman asserting her independence. Characterful supporting performances from Richard
Burkhard, Frances Gregory and Andrew Mackenzie-Wicks too. A harrowing night out, but

gripping.

Touring to July 18, musictheatre.wales