Angel's Bone at London Coliseum: Spectacular and disturbing

At the behest of Arts Council England, English National Opera now works across two cities, London and Manchester, an awkward arrangement that the company is determined to make work. In May, at Manchester’s Aviva Studios, it gave the UK premiere of Angel’s Bone, a Pulitzer-winning opera by Shanghai-born, New York-based composer Du Yun (libretto by Royce Vavrek). Now the production has reached the Coliseum, ENO’s London base.

The Aviva is an in-the-round space, the Coliseum has a traditional proscenium arch, so director Kip Williams and his many collaborators (including Marg Horwell, set and costumes; Ash J Woodward, video design; Jack Knowles, lighting) have had to adapt. I didn’t see the Manchester version, but the London iteration is intricate and spectacular. The stage, initially inert, doesn’t stay that way for long. Room-like structures soon fill the space, their configuration consistently shifting through the opera’s 80 minutes. We are in the home of a clearly prosperous couple, Mr and Mrs X E, who, equally clearly, are not getting along; a For Sale sign indicates that they’ve hit hard times.

They bicker and complain until two wounded angels magically appear, complete with angel wings. Soon the X E’s begin tearing the feathers from their wings and the interlopers become their slaves, sold as sex toys to friends and neighbours, abused both mentally and physically. A third angel looks on, providing impassive commentary on what he sees.

The Cast of ENO’s Angel’s Bone 2026, London Coliseum

©Tristram Kenton

Williams’ perpetual-motion staging fractures and refracts the narrative through three camera operators, the images they capture projected in multiple frames onto the stage’s giant back wall. Sometimes the projections reveal details we can’t see, at others they magnify what the stage shows; there are even glimpses of the audience, making us uncomfortable witnesses. The to-and-fro between stage and projections is dazzling and dizzying. The singers’ every expression is revealed in minute detail; their face-acting is utterly convincing, and that’s rare in opera.

So overwhelming is the visual experience that the music occasionally melts into the background, but Du Yun’s score, conducted by Baldur Brönnimann, is mercurial, embracing styles from across the centuries, right up to the present, sensuous one minute, brutally abrasive or sarcastically smoochy the next. If it’s hard to make out a personal voice, that’s not a problem, given the production’s frantic pacing.

Vocal performances are uniformly strong. Allison Cook fearlessly embodies the chain-smoking nervous energy of Mrs X E, while Rodney Earl Clarke makes her husband a reluctant co-conspirator, prepared to do anything to rekindle his wife’s passion, but only money can achieve that. As the abused angels, Matthew McKinney and Mariam Wallentin capture both their dismay and their defiance, while Keith Pun is eerily unemotive as the observing angel. The chamber choir Kantos is a hyperactive active participant throughout.

An anatomy of power and cruelty among the privileged, Angel’s Bone offers a powerful, painful experience.