With Opera Australia’s semi-staged but supercharged production of American composer Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek’s Breaking the Waves, the aftermath of this three-act work will linger long after Friday night’s one-off performance at Arts Centre Melbourne’s Hamer Hall.
Based on Danish director Lars Von Trier’s 1996 film and premiered at Opera Philadelphia in 2016, Breaking the Waves is nothing short of a devastatingly confronting psycho-twister. The work tells a foreboding story that feels both incredulous and real as it spins a tornado of themes that cannot fail to challenge discussion.
The protagonist of the story is Bess McNeill (soprano Jennifer Black), a young woman traumatised by the death of her brother years earlier but who finds love and sexual awakening when she meets and marries a North Sea oil rig worker she amusingly calls Jan-of-the-rig (baritone Duncan Rock).
Bess is also inextricably joined to her austere and conservative Calvinist community in the remote coastal Scottish town of Skye in the 1970s. When Jan is paralysed in an industrial accident on the rig, Bess blames herself. Initially resistant but at Jan’s request, she agrees to have sex with other men so that the experience can be related back to him in order for their love to have ongoing sexual meaning.
It sounds perverse while, thick on the surface, there’s the mark of male chauvinism and sado-masochist psychology at play. You cannot escape the feeling that Bess is both brainwashed and victimised in this religiously manipulative patriarchal vacuum.
While the music glows beautifully in Bess and Jan’s deep mutual love, the simmering, dramatic darkness and agitation of Mazzoli’s score intensifies Vavrek’s direct and provocative text with astounding force.
Mazzoli and Vavrek effectively construct how Bess’ communion with God will help cure Jan and the superb use of a chorus of churchmen channels religious impositions hauntingly.
When Bess is later ostracised by her community and brutally beaten to death, Jan is miraculously cured in a finale where Bess becomes both victim and modern-day martyr of sorts.
Disability, sexual freedom and expression, euthanasia, suicide, bodily rights, religious indoctrination, self-sacrifice, discrimination and empowerment raise their heads, highlighting how we judge what we see as an outsider, our failings to understand the reasoning behind another’s actions and the bigger picture that influences our ideas.
It is 5 years since I saw Breaking the Waves on the stage in a small but powerful production at San Francisco’s West Edge Opera and its remarkably portrayed conglomeration of issues continue to resonate.
Given the constraints of the brief, director Anne-Louise Sarks makes her company and opera debut with a keen sense of stylistic balance and poetry but misses the potential to push the boundaries so evidently portrayed in music and text. When on stage together, Bess and Jan feel more often stiffly separated by a chasm and both sexual intimacy and barbarity is merely described safely by surtitles.
With Orchestra Victoria set well back on the low-lit rear stage, Marg Horwell’s sole design feature is a pair of impressive full-height separated stringed curtains with metallic touches – one behind the other – that effectively create spatial division on one hand, but occasionally fracture the view on the other.
Two benches lie within on either side and Paul Jackson’s otherwise incisive lighting assists to demarcate action cleverly across spaces alluding to church, hospital, oil rig and seedy town corners.
The work is brilliantly cast across the board with Black’s pitiable, soul-bearing Bess leading the way in a tour de force performance. Rarely off-stage, Black gives everything of her wrought and powerful vocal instrument as she engages with riveting emotional energy, revealing everything from vulnerability to strength with total, honesty and conviction.
Both physically and vocally muscular, Rock is the ultimate package as the brawny built Jan, a role he has portrayed many times over, including in the Australian premiere of the work at the Adelaide Festival in 2020.
Rich and expressive mezzo-soprano Sian Sharp delivers a touching, knockout performance as Bess’ loyal and loving sister-in-law, Dodo, John Longmuir’s burning warmth and hefty tenor perfectly fit the sympathetic but authoritative Doctor Richardson and seeing the highly accomplished Emma Matthews back on the stage lacking nothing of her lush soprano is a treat indeed- as brief as her role as Bess’ overbearing and uncompromising mother is.
Gennadi Dubinsky and Kiran Rajasingam temper the work effectively in smaller roles respectively as Terry (Jan’s friend and colleague saved from injury by Jan in the accident) and the moral hard-hitting Councilman.
Positioned behind the second string curtain, the chorus of men combined with mighty potency and Orchestra Victoria, under the assured guidance of conductor Jessica Cottis, united with precision and purpose in shaping a score that pricks, pulls, tears and electrifies the psyche.
Breaking the Waves is not without its flaws – Act 1 seems to move along somewhat slowly and Jan’s miracle cure perplexingly jackknife’s the finale – but the work will live on through its plump, powerful storytelling and gritty themes. And, if a rather more intimate, no-holds-barred approach is taken, even better!
Breaking the Waves
Hamer Hall – Arts Centre Melbourne, St Kilda Road, Melbourne
Performance: Friday 26 July 2024
Information: www.opera.org.au
Images: Jennifer Black as Bess and Duncan Rock as Jan in Breaking the Waves – photo by Jeff Busby | Jennifer Black as Bess, Sian Sharp as Dodo and Emma Matthews as Mother in Breaking the Waves – photo by Jeff Busby
Review: Paul Selar