The Blue Woman, Royal Opera House review ★★★★★

In the world of opera, female victims of sexually predatory men opera need no introduction: Don Giovanni's many conquests, Carmen, Tosca, Madama Butterfly...

To see through the eyes of such abused women, composer Laura Bowler and librettist Laura Lomas devised The Blue Woman, a performance piece that paints in abstract terms the process of losing one's identity through rape, and, painfully, refinding it.

In the Linbury Theatre of the Royal Opera House, singers and cellists on stage augmented by electronics and percussion (music director Jessica Cottis, conductor Jamie Man) create a sound world that complements video above. The blue of the title is reflected on stage, and in allusions to submerging water and to the sky of a healing new day.

Singer Rosie Middleton and cellist Tamaki Sugimoto on stage in The Blue Woman. Photo: Camilla Greenwill

In the film, a life ripped apart by violation, and, very gradually, retrieved again, is represented by a woman's literal search for herself. She leaves the squalor of an abandoned building and walks the streets, parks and riverside of London.

The four singers, Elaine Mitchener, Lucy Schaufer, Gweneth Ann Rand and Rosie Middleton, clutch their handbags symbolically as they voice the sensations of defilement and invasion. Drowning is used as a metaphor for the woman's experience, and ultimately she surfaces, propelled only by her own strength of will.

The abstract score and video do not rush this process, and the result is not an opera in any conventional sense. It is, rather, a heartfelt tribute to the many women who have experienced sexual abuse, although it seems to think in terms of a one-off incident, and does not address the altogether more complex issue of repeated assaults in the home.

But with intensely committed performances by the artists, the production directed by Katie Mitchell goes some way to deglamourising the Don Giovannis of this world.

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The Blue Woman is sung in English with English surtitles. Further performances are on 8,9, 11 July. Click here for returns