ENO’s Gospel According to the Other Mary: great music weighed down by a worthy staging

Terrorism; East-West diplomacy; nuclear war: John Adams’s operas have poured music into the faultlines of 21st-century global politics, and the tremors have been significant. Simply staging The Death of Klinghoffer recently was enough to see the Met picketed on charges of anti-Semitism. While The Gospel According to the Other Mary isn’t going to start any riots, Adams’s latest work marks a turning point, both in the composer’s music and his social mission. No longer content to comment and observe, Adams turns his gaze to the story of the Passion — reclaiming and rewriting the originary narrative of the Christian West.

Yes, Gospel is a companion-piece to Adams’s 2000 opera-oratorio El Niño, offering a crucifixion to bookend its nativity, but where El Niño’s rewrite was a delicate, interrogative affair, the Gospel’s is emphatic, declarative. The same magpie collage of sources — Primo Levi, Dorothy Day, Louise Erdrich, Old and New Testaments — shape the libretto, but here they conspire to seize the story back from between its pastel-coloured Good News covers and play it out among the drop-outs, addicts and illegal immigrants of LA’s Skid Row. It’s a worthy ambition. Perhaps too worthy.

Weighed down by its social conscience and by the weary literalism of Peter Sellars’s all-things-to-all-men staging, this operatic Gospel stumbles and drags its feet. Is this abstract landscape the Middle East? Is the barbed wire corralling those waiting to cross into Gaza, or are they inmates in some Western prison? Are these hieratic gestures the rituals of an oppressive religion, or the empty twitchings of a people in search of a faith? The answer in all cases seems to be yes. Say yes too often and art is lost in empty affirmation.

There is nothing in Peter Sellars’s staging to convince me that Gospel is an opera — which would be a bigger problem if Sellars himself hadn’t already offered a solution last year at Barbican.