Notes on a scandal | 2 February 2017

Kids: who’d have them? Certainly no one who has ever been to the opera. If they’re not murdering you, they’re betraying you, defying orders or throwing themselves into the arms of the nearest unsuitable suitor. What happens when that suitor is a god, or — god forbid — their own brother or sister? Answers came on the back of two very different operatic postcards this week.

At the Barbican, bathtime gone bad. A claw-foot bath sits centre stage, a cold, white womb in which monstrous twins writhe in fleshy ecstasy. Backs arched, legs flexed into Priapic verticals, they coalesce the clenching pulse of orgasm and the surging agony of childbirth into a single, exquisitely choreographed moment.

Combine choreographer-provocateur Javier De Frutos with Les Enfants Terribles — Jean Cocteau’s curdled fairy tale of an orphaned brother and sister whose mutual love is contorted into something inadmissible — and things were always going to get uncomfortable. What was harder to predict was the restraint and beauty of that discomfort.

Taking Cocteau’s novel and Jean-Pierre Melville’s film adaptation as a jumping-off point, Philip Glass’s 1996 ‘dance-opera’ is a theatrical hybrid, whose greedy quest after sensation heaps dance, song and spoken word together into a fantasy that outstrips its originals.

Glass distils the story down to just a central quartet of characters: siblings Paul and Lise, and Gérard and Agathe, the two outsiders drawn into their world of imagination. Originally each was doubled by both a singer and dancer. Here the characters are atomised still further, with four dancers each joining soprano Jennifer Davis and baritone Gyula Nagy (both Jette Parker Young Artists at the Royal Opera) in the central roles. The effect is bewildering, a sort of subjunctive reality in which what is and what might have been co-exist in real time.