Picture a day like this, Royal Opera House, Linbury Theatre review ★★★★★

Among the characters we meet in Picture a day like this is a composer. This is not the opera’s actual composer, George Benjamin, but a self-regarding young woman who fears ‘the creeping thought that I am banal’.

Benjamin, of course, is anything but banal, renowned for his dynamic orchestral effects and for vocal lines that fly and swoop (and so require singers of exceptional range). Librettist Martin Crimp could write that line without sailing too close to the wind.

This double act is behind two earlier standout productions at the Royal Opera House, the crystalline Written on Skin and the more visceral Lessons in Love and Violence. In Picture a day like this, in the ROH Linbury Theatre, they revisit something like the detached world of the first, as a bereaved mother sets out on an unusual quest.

The Woman's son died just as, Crimp observes, heartbreakingly, he was starting to speak in whole sentences. In her sorrow, she follows the advice of a priest-like sage and looks for a truly happy person. If found, she must take a button from their sleeve, and her child’s life will be restored. This fable has ancient roots that reach down into several cultures.

Beate Mordal and Cameron Shahbazi as the Composer and Assistant. Photo: Camilla Greenwell

The opera’s title is taken from the words of the last person on the list of possible candidates. First up, besotted lovers, deliriously in love. With clothes strewn everywhere, there are buttons aplenty. But the lovers’ bliss starts to unravel and the moment has passed.

Next, a maker of buttons, covered in his own handiwork like a pearly king, and exhibited like a museum piece. But the happiness he once found as a meticulous craftsman was taken from him by mechanisation. The successful composer is riddled with fear, the affluent art collector, for all his Warhols and Manets, cannot fully enjoy his art, being neurotic about security.

Finally the woman is let into a garden, which grows before our eyes, and here her quest concludes in an unexpected way.

While the audience may feel the occasional urge to yell ‘Get out of there now!’, this is a mesmerising tale, ethereally sung by the strangers. As the Woman, mezzo-soprano Ema Nikolovska is both vulnerable and stoical, responding to this rollercoaster day with a voice of many colours.

Beate Mordal and Cameron Shahbazi as the Lovers. Photo: Camilla Greenwell

Soprano Beate Mordal and counter-tenor Cameron Shahbazi play first the lovers, then the composer and her PA, contrasting roles in which both voices soar to otherworldly heights. And from baritone John Brancy as the button-maker and the art collector there is thrilling singing that crosses into other registers. He has a busy international career. Let’s hope a return to London is on the cards.

Benjamin writes for a compact orchestra with prominent roles for the percussion, which in a way narrates the story, with audible exclamation marks, warnings and chorus-like clamour. He is the Ready, Steady, Cook composer, capable to conjuring up magic out of a handful of ingredients/instruments. It’s a soundscape that is very vivid in the theatre, whereupon it dissipates, but the experience of being in the music for its duration is a fine one.

Corinna Niemeyer conducts this densely written score with precision and exuberance. Daniel Jeanneteau and Marie-Christine Soma direct, light and design the production, with video work by Hicham Berrada, whose magical garden resembles the Clangers’ planet, everybody’s happy place.

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Picture a day like this is sung in English with English surtitles. Further performances are on 24, 25, 27, 28, 30 Sept; 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10 Oct. Click here to book