Page 457 - Aldeburgh Festival 2022 FINAL COVERAGE BOOK

7 June 2022

ALDEBURGH FESTIVAL: VIOLET

Florence Lockheart

Tom Coult's first opera opens this year's festival with irresistibly apocalyptic charm

Richard Burkhard as Felix and Anna Dennis as Violet © Marc Brenner

Snape Maltings was the perfect setting in which to experience Violet, Tom Coult’s first opera and
the first of this year’s Aldeburgh Festival. The collection of rural industrial red brick buildings on
the edge of Suffolk Wildlife Trust’s Snape Marshes Nature Reserve could well mirror the
isolated village over which the title character’s husband, Felix (played by Richard Burkhard),
presides. The progress of the plot, which chronicles the erosion of time in this small community, is
measured by the village clocktower, a guillotine-like piece of scenery adjusted at the beginning of
each scene by clock keeper Andrew MacKenzie-Wicks to show the hours lost, at first imperceptible
but soon catastrophic.

The ever-changing digital backdrop, along with bare-bones staging, give the performance a
disorienting, era-defying feel, and what initially seems like period costume is broken down by
costume designer Cécile Trémolières with the layering of modern props and textiles. As well as a
Stepford Wives approach to gender roles, Violet hints at a cultish village hierarchy, with its
breakdown reported by Laura, Frances Gregory’s maid character, with tales of villagers’ desperate
sacrifice – animal and human.