Page 517 - Aldeburgh Festival 2022 FINAL COVERAGE BOOK
P. 517
24 June 2022
Violet, Music Theatre Wales/Britten-Pears
Arts review - well sung and played, but to
what end?
Anna Dennis shines, but composer Tom Coult and librettist Alice Birch play at
anti-opera
by David Nice
Anna Dennis as Violet and Frances Gregory as LauraAll images by Marc Brenner
Best new opera in years, they said – don’t ask who – after the Aldeburgh Festival premiere of Tom
Coult’s Violet. I’d have been happy in Hackney had it been as good as, say, Philip Venables’ 4.48
Psychosis or Stuart MacRae’s The Devil Inside. Alas, nowhere near.
The premise is interesting: oppressed wife Violet, a prisoner in her own home, starts to find a zest
for life as time begins to disappear and what seems like global meltdown heads towards the end of
the world. But Alice Birch’s doomy libretto gives no powerful words to make us care about the four
characters, and when the overwritten farrago settles into more natural phrases, Coult seems intent
