Call of duty

Is it possible to write a feminist opera about Jack the Ripper? Composer Iain Bell thinks it is, and his Jack the Ripper: The Women of Whitechapel tries very, very hard to prove it. But while the result is respectful, topical and agonisingly, paralysingly sincere, it’s also a sheep in wolf’s clothing. You can’t have your victims and kill them too.

You have only to look at the opera’s title, bent awkwardly round its central colon, to see the conflict. Front and centre you have Jack the Ripper — a marketing department’s darling, promising Gothic horror and lashings of gore. Following behind (in slightly smaller type) you have his victims, the drab, downtrodden women whose lives and voices the piece hopes, laudably, to restore. You can have bloody, swaggering sensationalism or you can have a social-history lesson about the plight of the urban poor.

Having created an unpalatable choice between dignity and drama, Bell and librettist Emma Jenkins choose dignity, and their opera has a tang of duty about it that never quite goes away. Excising the killer from the story (the Ripper never appears on stage) leaves a wound at the centre of the narrative that no amount of sisterhood can staunch, leaving us wallowing in emotional platitudes. ‘I forgive you as you are,’ the five women sing to one another in a scene less suited to a filthy, flea-infested dosshouse than the dormitory of a girls’ boarding school. Compare it with the austere pathos of the Nieces’ ‘From the gutter’ in Peter Grimes and its softness seems far too cheaply won.

If a wrong-footed concept and under-developed characters send the drama lurching and stumbling — now procedural, now a courtroom drama, now an extended dream sequence — the missed opportunities of the music are less easily explained.