Opera takes place in an alternative universe where everyone is a trained opera singer. Watching Freeze Frame Opera’s production of Dead Man Walking, I found myself asking again and again “why are they singing?” The plainspoken conversation with elongated stress words and undulated vowels…
I have only ever seen some operas in German before, and I was fortunate enough not to speak the language. They could’ve been wailing about anything, but I didn’t have to listen. I could just hear the sounds as sounds, like birdsong in the evening. When the singing lacks rhyme and melody and the lyrics lack poetic meaning, I’d rather listen to something in French, subtitles off.
Dead Man Walking is about a young man sentenced to death for the dreadful murder of a teenage couple. There in prison, a kindhearted nun tries to save his soul, and spiritual complications ensue. Hearing it was set in rural Louisiana, home of True Detective, I expected it to be Southern Gothic in tone or at the least, rural noir. The redemption of an irredeemable man is a classic plot in the stories of writers like Faulkner, McCarthy and O’Connor; yet I found this opera too sentimental for the gothic, and too humanistic for noir. It lacked the necessary murkiness. Sure, human life is sacred, forgiveness is a virtue, and the death penalty is therefore unethical; but the play goes as far as to making its rapist-murderer a Christ-like figure. In his last scene he is strapped vertically to the lethal-injection bed, his arms in a T, the bed glowing with light.
Dead Man Walking presented by Freeze Frame Opera photography by terrificpicturesaus.
While Southern Gothic writers often depict their depraved hillbillies as Saints and Jesuses, they always do so with dark irony and pitch black humour. Dead Man Walking however, plays the idea with utter earnestness. We are made to love the killer by the end, weeping at his long protracted death; yet we know nothing about the victims! This is a familiar gripe with the culture industry, which turns true crimes into spectacles, spawning books, podcasts, movies and tv series; likely of no benefit to the victim’s families. Dead Man Walking seeks to teach a humanist message, but when done in the form of morbid entertainment, the message just comes across as ‘all human lives are sacred, especially the lives we give our stage-time to’.
The opera singers in Dead Man Walking are world class: they can sing loud for a long time and skillfully quaver their voices. Underscored by a live orchestra including a quartet playing piano, cello, clarinet and accordion, sounding all very French, possibly Cajun; but this didn’t sound like high octane zydeco. It sounded more like the soundtrack for Professor Layton and Curious Village, all smoky and intriguing and mysterious. While the music did suit the Louisianan setting, and I could feel the Spanish Moss dangling above me, there weren’t any big hooks for the singers to really get around. Most of it was suspenseful padding and plodding and sneaking, like a cartoon Captain Hook tiptoeing a figure eight loop around the pirate ship. Just poison the drink you scoundrel!
There were a handful of very great scenes in Dead Man Walking, and these scenes had either no singing at all, or singing that was music-singing instead of talk-singing. The music-singing was reserved for the big-ticket dream sequences, scenes involving giant casts of chorus members; the most affecting one being where the nun is encircled by a stream of happy-clappy sunday schoolers, skipping their gospel in a merry melody. The circle is then infiltrated by the boisterous swagger of death-row prisoners, who bellow violently like ghosts in a coalmine. Finally they are joined by the grieving parents and friends of the killer’s victims; their bodies and cries all melting together as they march in a Bosch-like cacophony. In these scenes my questions about the singing were answered.
Dead Man Walking presented by Freeze Frame Opera photography by terrificpicturesaus.
I take my binoculars from their pouch and focus on the faces of the actors. When I look at the nun, I see she is crying. Then when I look at the killer, I am shocked to see he is also, almost, crying! I can’t believe it. It’s the magic of binoculars. Instead of being blurry peg people who sing for some reason, the characters become human to me.
Then I feel it! The murderer! He really is a Child of God. Through binoculars I see beyond the easter-island outlines of his face, into the shadows where lay his eyes, and in his eyes there’s pain. A crying scared boy! And the nun, Sister Helen. Through her tears she is smiling, and like the spirit of maternal essence she radiates love and concern. They are singing but I’m not listening. I let the words become sounds and the music swells louder, and when I remove my binoculars, I see the two figures hugging. I feel it.
Freeze Frame Opera’s production of Dead Man Walking, aptly showing at the Fremantle Prison, is a real blockbuster with excellent acting, lighting and sound. Although I spent most of it being confused by the singing and was disappointed by the conventional story, it did cause me to reflect on compassion, forgiveness and the sanctity of human life. I feel mildly more sanct and human now.