Time is suspended for 105 minutes as a wedding celebration takes a shocking turn
Simon Stone’s work has been absent from Australian stages for years. Innocence is a reminder of his gift for exploring the thornier reaches of human experience.
OPERA
Innocence. By Kajia Saariaho. Festival Theatre, Adelaide, February 28.
Simon Stone is attracted to dark, complex subjects and that affinity has served him well. Avid theatregoers still remember the phenomenal production of Thyestes in 2010, created by a still 20-something Stone and his Hayloft Project colleagues in Melbourne. Stone relocated to Europe about a decade ago and from there has crafted an enviable career in theatre and opera, a form in which there’s no shortage of tragedy.
Kaija Saariaho’s Innocence was commissioned with the buy-in of six international opera houses and Stone, now 40, was asked to direct. Innocence was an immense success and since 2021 Stone’s production has been seen in five different cities.
Now it’s Adelaide’s turn with New York’s Metropolitan Opera to follow.
On Friday night Stone was on stage to accept – along with the huge team Innocence requires – a standing ovation after the first of four Adelaide Festival performances of this urgent piece of music theatre.
His work has been absent from Australian stages for years and Innocence is a reminder of his gift for exploring the thornier reaches of human experience.
The opera begins at a hotel wedding reception with an unusually small guest list. The bride knows all too little about her new husband’s family, including nothing of an absent son who committed an atrocity a decade before when he was a student at an international school in Helsinki.
It quickly becomes clear that Tereza, a waitress fatefully called in at the last minute due to someone’s illness, is linked to the wedding party in the most scarifying way. Nothing can prevent a reckoning when the celebration and the traumatic event collide.
From its first moments Saariaho’s music establishes a state of foreboding. Intricate textures, timbres and diaphanous atmospherics insinuate themselves in and around the action, sometimes like delicate veils of mist and at others ratcheting up emotions with tense eruptions of brass and percussion.
The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra plays this nerve-tingling score under the sure direction of French conductor Clement Mao-Takacs, a Saariaho specialist, and the Adelaide Chamber Singers and State Opera Chorus are a cloud of invisible, spectral voices haunting the soundscape. They all do the home team proud.
Chloe Lamford’s two-story, ever-revolving set is a kind of character itself as past and present co-exist within its walls.
Grief and guilt are everywhere. Former students of the school graphically relive their ordeal, speaking in their own languages about the suffering that comes with being a survivor. Family members turn on one another. Things are revealed that complicate responses to the central horrifying act.
Although the violence that propels the opera is seen and acknowledged there is some detachment in that respect. Innocence is overwhelmingly a character-driven work. Stone directs the action with crystalline clarity and a great deal of humanity. Everyone is culpable in some way and in intense pain.
A large international cast of soloists rises magnificently to the challenge, suspending time for Innocence’s unbroken 105-minute timespan.
There are unforgettable portraits of loss from everyone, especially Finnish mezzo Jenny Carlstedt as the bereaved Tereza and American soprano Lucy Shelton as a teacher driven half mad by what has happened.
The enigmatically titled Innocence has been described as a psychological thriller, which it is, and by its composer as a story of recovery and healing.
There is a tentative offer of release from torment at the end; just a whisper. That’s possibly the best we can hope for in these trying days.
Tickets: $89-$369. Bookings: Online. Duration: 1hr 45mins without interval. Ends March 5.