A nun named Sister Helen Prejean offers to be his spiritual adviser, and their awkward but intense moral debate lasts until she watches him expire in the execution chamber.
All of this is a true story, and Prejean’s subsequent memoir becomes a bestseller – turned into an Oscar-winning film, and also an opera by composer Jake Heggie and librettist Terrence McNally.
It has notched up more than 80 productions worldwide, but only now – 25 years later – is it getting its first fully-staged professional production in London.
Under the direction of Annilese Miskimmon, this opera emerges as something both gut-wrenchingly dreadful and at the same time unexpectedly beautiful.
There are no hummable tunes here, no anguished Puccinian flights. Heggie’s eclectic accompaniment – under Kerek Hasan’s direction – becomes an instrumental conversation gracefully underscoring the verbal conversations onstage.
And when the action dissolves into outbursts of fury by the protagonists, the orchestral sound becomes thunderous.
The cast perform with burning conviction. Christine Rice’s incarnation of Sister Helen – with her doubts, fears, and hopes – is so sympathetically portrayed that one instantly accepts her characterisation.
Joseph’s mother – incarnated by Sarah Connolly – is both ravishingly sung and searingly believable. And as the relationship between the protagonist and Sister Helen acquires a visceral intensity, you hang on every word.
But it’s Michael Mayes’s Joseph who draws all eyes, a picture of rage, despair, and pathos as he tugs convulsively at his manacles.
One of the strengths of this production lies in the fine supporting parts, from the prison guards and lawyers to Madeline Boreham’s Sister Rose, and to Jacques Imbrailo’s rage as he gradually accepts the futility of capital punishment for his daughter’s murderer.
Another strength lies in Alex Eales’s adroit designs, which begin with a stomach-turning re-enactment of the original crime, and end with a chilling (and apparently well-researched) vision of the execution chamber. And Miskimmon’s direction doesn’t put a foot wrong.
‘Dead Man Walking’ is apparently what prison guards in Louisiana intone – followed by the Lord’s Prayer – as they march a condemned man to his death. I will not forget the horror of this slow-mo spectacle as the victim shuffles, trembling and rigid with fear, towards his doom.
Meanwhile nul points for Katie Mitchell’s clumsy attempt to rewrite Janacek’s The Makropulos Case as a lesbian tract at the Royal Opera House.
Jakub Hrusa conducts this great opera with sensitive brilliance, and the cast led by Ausrine Stundyte perform heroically, but the staging is both baffling and batty beyond belief.
The ENO’s Dead Man Walking runs at The Coliseum London until November 18.
