The final new production of English National Opera’s season is Thea Musgrave’s Mary, Queen of Scots, directed by Stewart Laing and conducted by Joana Carneiro. It was last heard in London at Sadler’s Wells during a 1980 tour by Scottish Opera, who premiered it in Edinburgh in 1977.
It’s a bleak, uncompromising piece, in many ways. Musgrave is having none of the still prevalent Romantic view of Mary as the passionate martyr of Fotheringhay, focusing instead on her years in Scotland between 1561 and her abdication in 1567, and probing her relationships with the three men who jostled to control her: her illegitimate half-brother James, a fierce Protestant, whose fixation with his sister, it is implied, may have been incestuous; Henry Darnley, her profligate second husband; and Bothwell, the Catholic mercenary, whose ostensible loyalty masks a tendency to coercion and sexual violence.
The score has a certain unyielding hardness of edge. Musgrave is good on plots and counter-plots, as alliances are formed and dissolved in ballrooms, and omnipresent slithering woodwind suggest there is no firm ground anywhere. Arguably the finest scene in the entire work, relentless in its tension, comes when the earls of Ruthven (Ronald Samm) and Morton (Jolyon Loy) conspire with Darnley (Rupert Charlesworth) to murder Riccio (Barnaby Rea). Elsewhere, much of the drama is advanced in a mixture of recitative and arioso, with vocal lines turning notably angular at moments of crisis. Lyrical passages are beautiful but rare, and a lovely chorus marks the arrival of Mary in Scotland. Darnley later woos her to music at once impressionistic and exquisitely insubstantial.
Laing, meanwhile, reimagines the piece in terms of 20th-century sectarianism. Protestants and Catholics, fanatics alike, are effectively indistinguishable from each other until allegiances are declared, but are also tacitly united by suspicion when Heidi Stober’s Mary arrives, elegant yet out of place in a couture trouser suit. It’s a telling idea, but can obscure our awareness of the underlying power dynamics: in particular, Mary’s insistence on a divine right to absolute monarchy doesn’t carry as much weight here as it should.
Sung and acted with blazing conviction across the board, though, the performance itself is tremendous. The title role lies high, and Stober is all thrilling top notes and terrific moments of defiance or self-assertion. Alex Otterburn makes a charismatic, lethally persuasive James. You really understand Mary’s initial attraction to Charlesworth’s elegantly sung if vapid Darnley, and the dissipation and degradation of his later scenes are disquietingly vivid. John Findon’s Bothwell masks steely brutality beneath the trappings of heldentenor heroism, while Rea makes a sonorous, unusually sympathetic Riccio. Carneiro, meanwhile, drives it all forwards with inexorable momentum, and the playing and choral singing are both superb.
It’s not always an easy work to like, but it’s powerfully done.
• At the Coliseum, London, until 18 February
