The Handmaid’s Tale is a triumph from the ENO’s turmoil

The real drama at the first night of The Handmaid’s Tale was all off-stage. Whether it went ahead at all was in the lap of the gods until the very last minute with the Musicians’ Union – unhappy about the treatment of their members in the run-up to the ENO’s move to Manchester – threatening to pull the plug on the whole event. Still, it was somehow, miraculously and with a lot of mediation, alright on the night.

Poul Ruder’s plangent adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel, with a libretto of Orwellian menace from Paul Bentley, turned out of make for a great night of opera. Ruder and Bentley conjure up a chillingly dystopian vision of a theocratic state of Gilead, in 2195, in which women are neither allowed to read nor write, are stripped of their identities and rights, and subjected to vile sexual abuse and brutality.

It all has, of course, a horrible resonance with Afghanistan where women, promised so much by the western powers, were casually abandoned to the Taliban.

James Hurley as director, Annemarie Woods, as set and costume designer, Akhila Krishnan as video designer and Yvonne Gilbert as sound designer deserve particular credit for assailing our senses with a remarkably plausible, if sparse and strident, curation of what it must feel like as a woman to live under such fundamentalist tyranny day after day.

Juliet Stevenson coldly talks to us through the proceedings as Professor Pieixoto, a vision in dazzling white couture, who sometimes walks on to the stage and chooses not to utter a single word as she knows that any would be superfluous. Kate Lindsey as the heroine Offred invests her role with poignancy and pathos. Rachel Nicholls débuts in the role of Aunt Lydia, and James Creswell provides a powerful performance as The Commander.

Timely, terrifying opera that makes me aware, once again, of how London’s loss when the ENO relocates to Manchester will be very much that city’s gain.

Limited performances at the London Coliseum until February 15