Review: PICTURE A DAY LIKE THIS, Royal Opera House

Death may be commonplace in opera but it’s usually at the end that someone plunges a knife into someone’s heart or jumps off a roof caught in the throes of passion. Picture a day like this, stylised in lower case, is different for two reasons.

Death here is not a grand dramatic gesture but a deeply despondent and desperate experience. It also comes at the get-go when an unnamed mother, mourning for the loss of her child, is tasked with finding a button from the shirt of a happy person before midnight. In return her son will be revived.

The premise is a playfully inventive way of reifying grief into something tangible. The mother, heartwarmingly performed by a reverent Ema Nikolovska, meanders through designers Daniel Jeanneteau and Marie-Christine Somas’ purgatorial labyrinth of a set, a room lined with mirrors that distort and twist her heavy reality. Guilt, desperation, and love melt into one anguished state.  

A range of people, on her list of “happy” people, are floated in ethereally as if they are exhibition pieces suspended in stasis. We are invited to inspect them. Are they really happy? Lovers who are the wrong word away from a quarrel. An artisan sailing on the high tide of a narcotic wave, despairingly escaping grim reality after his job was replaced by a machine. An acclaimed composer tortured by self-doubt.

Each initially appear content, only for Geroge Benjamin’s score to erode their façades into dust. The ambient music gently pours out like sweet and vicious honey as if to soothe the variations of misery lingering beneath. Low graceful strings, gentle and melancholic, sway under Corianna Niemayer’s vigilant baton. Brass rains down from above injecting urgency. Time is ticking for the mother, and for us all.   

Beate Mordal and Cameron Shahbazi portray the lovers with an erotic spark, toying with each other and then the mother. Vocally the two are smooth, sensual, and erotic. John Brancy thrillingly commits to the part of the artisan, his baritone vocals pushed and twisted by the mercurial score. It’s engrossing to watch him unravel, especially in his costume rippling with buttons like a pearly king.

This is the fourth time Benjamin has worked with playwright Martin Crimp as a librettist, and whilst all the parts are there, Picture a day like this doesn’t feel like it’s more than their sum. The likely culprit is Crimp’s lyrical but dramatically anemic libretto.

The premise promises a poignant meditation on the ever-fleeting pursuit of happiness in our age in which the veneer of joy is flung at us from all angles. But it just doesn’t deliver with its overly poetic and ambiguously tricksy conclusion. It’s a shame that none of the narrative or conceptual bows are adequately tied. Benjamin’s mercurial score simply demands more narrative weight.

Picture a day like this plays at the Royal Opera House until 10 October

Photo Credit: Camilla Greenwell

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