Deeply problematic, both aesthetically & ethically: Du Yun's Angel's Bone from English National Opera at London Coliseum

Du Yun & Royce Vavrek: Angel's Bone - English National Opera at London Coliseum [Photo: Tristram Kenton]

Du Yun & Royce Vavrek: Angel's Bone; Allison Cook, Rodney Earl Clarke, Matthew McKinney, Mariam Wallentin, Keith Pun, director: Kip Williams, conductor: Baldur Brönnimann; English National Opera at the London Coliseum
Reviewed 16 October 2026 by Saskia Bibb

In the London premiere by English National Opera of Angel's Bone, an “opera-theatre” work exploring slavery and human trafficking, moments of winning music are swallowed up by ill-conceived theatre. The graphic depictions of rape and violence are as harrowing as they are fruitless.

Sasiki Bibb writes: Composer Du Yun and librettist Royce Vavrek tell the story of two angels who fall to earth. The unhappily married couple who find them are overcome by greed and exploit the innocents, clipping their valuable feathers and condemning them to sexual slavery. Yun and Vavrek readily advertise in the programme that the desired effect is introspection; we are supposed to ask the question “when given the means… to exploit those who are vulnerable, how quickly do we abandon our morals?” The answer, for any normal person, is a hell of a lot less quickly than that.

There is no dramatic arc and not a single believable character. This is part due to the libretto consisting of a string of abstract soundbites, and in part due to a poorly paced plot. The programme would have us believe that Mr & Mrs X.E. initially nurse the angels back to health, but “care quickly turns to control”. It is very quick indeed, blink and you’ll miss it. Within minutes of being introduced to the unhappy couple, the angels have landed in the garden, and a heartbeat later they are pinning the angels to the kitchen table and mutilating them. That leaves 99% of the opera left for the unrelenting horrors of their exploitation, and an incoherent coda that confuses the message and takes the focus off the victims. The last thing I wanted was for the show to last any longer, but the descent into amorality was so rushed that it was impossible to buy into the rest of the drama.

Du Yun & Royce Vavrek: Angel's Bone - Allison Cook, Keith Pun - English National Opera at London Coliseum [Photo: Tristram Kenton]

The character of Mrs X.E. is ambitious in scope, the aim being to find the sweet spot where the audience is horrified by her actions but sufficiently able to relate to her that they confront the darkness of their own character. God help anyone who can empathise with Mrs X.E. She chooses the dark path instantly, and pursues it with fervour. We are not given any reason to believe that she is anything other than a psychopath. Are we meant to be softened by the brief allusion to financial hardship, or her barking to her husband that she doesn’t love him? A character of such one-dimensional evil is both impossible to relate to and incredibly boring.

Alison Cook was therefore handed a mammoth task. While she could not perform miracles with such flawed material, her unfaltering energy did at least provide abundant momentum — a firm hand to drag us through proceedings. Vocally she triumphed, providing the incisive and flexible singing demanded by the challenging score, from earthy bottom notes to a ringing top, with emphatically clear text.

Mr X.E. is a forgettable character that vanishes in the wake of Mrs X.E.’s deranged histrionics, leaving no sense of him as a person. This is no fault of Rodney Earl Clarke’s acting and he gives a committed performance. His voice lacked bite, although his Louis Armstrong/opera crossover moment was diverting. “Male soprano” barely qualifies as a character. It is a gimmick, the only purpose of which is to raise eyebrows by putting the words “male” and “soprano” together. Apart from anything else, Keith Pun is not a soprano, he is a countertenor. He stands around watching, emotionally and narratively detached, occasionally singing (perfectly well but with no chance to shine). The angels themselves are twitching caricatures of PTSD. They have no character, no personality, no humanity.

Musically, Du Yun catapults us through a dizzying array of genres. The opera opens in the contemporary classical paradigm, before crashing into a drunken, twisted jazz romp for the orgiastic party — the upbeat style subverted to create a gnawing feeling of perversion that fits the ensuing depravity. For the first appearance of the angels Du Yun writes with bewitching, enigmatic lyricism. The melodies twist and leap, with a heady, hypnotic affect. Matthew McKinney, in the role of Boy Angel, has the perfect voice for this: lean, supple and direct. Throughout he imbues his voice with suffering, without losing the sweetness of his lyrical tenor that speaks to the character’s innocence. The many fiendish high passages were delivered with a piercing emotion as well as a grounded legato.

Du Yun & Royce Vavrek: Angel's Bone - Mariam Wallentin - English National Opera at London Coliseum [Photo: Nirah Sanghani]

The problem with the music is not in what Du Yun writes, rather in the moment when she throws the pen down and dismisses the entire premise of opera. After Girl Angel, played by Mariam Wallentin, is assaulted, she responds with a pointed non-aria of electronic sound and spoken word that descends into screaming. Du Yun explained in an interview that “any victim, any girl being raped, would not deliver an aria. Someone would scream or use their voice in a visceral way”. The flaw in this line of argument is that, in real life, no one responds to any event by singing an aria. The power of opera is that it channels human experiences, even the most intense, into music. It is very strange for ENO to give such a large platform to someone so contemptuous of the art form.

Kip Williams’s staging is defined by the team of cameramen on stage filming the cast, and the huge screens above the stage on which this footage appears live. It’s a remarkable feat, and a terrible idea. The kool-aid of exciting new technological possibilities has been drunk, and no one has stopped to ask if it has any aesthetic merit. People come to opera for the experience of live performance, and this does not feel like live performance. The eye is drawn to the big screens, so you feel completely detached from the cast. Exacerbating this is the fact that the singing is miked and the cameras don’t show the whole stage at once, so it’s impossible to connect what you’re hearing to the singers on stage — I doubt it would have made much difference if the music had been pre-recorded. The final straw is that, even if you force yourself to watch the live version, often you can’t: at several points the action is fully concealed behind sets.

One such moment is a prolonged and horrifyingly graphic rape scene, that takes place behind the closed door of the bathroom and is presented in sickeningly close detail on the huge screens. Watching this is a horrible experience, which is precisely what the team was going for, but it is deeply problematic, both aesthetically and ethically.

To start with, it is a cheap trick. It is shocking and affecting not by virtue of artistry, but only because the material is inherently harrowing and the depiction is borderline pornographic. Secondly, one doesn’t need to go deep into the philosophical weeds to see that art needs to do something more than display the brutal, unfiltered horror of reality. Reality itself provides that in bucketloads, just turn on the news. But finally, and most seriously, there is the question of whether it is ethical to display such content. Journalism is aware of the need to have a conversation about whether it is in the public interest to publish graphic material. There is no sense that such a conversation took place here. The tagline for this ENO season is “opera that does not look away”. Of course we shouldn’t look away from the issue of sexual exploitation, but it is only natural and right to want to look away from the act itself.

Du Yun & Royce Vavrek: Angel's Bone - English National Opera at London Coliseum [Photo: Tristram Kenton]

To “challenge” the audience has to be a give-and-take: the audience faces up to a dark reality it would be easier to avoid, in return they leave with a deeper understanding, a new perspective. The audience walked in thinking rape was a horrifying crime, and walked out thinking rape was a horrifying crime. Art, of course, doesn’t have to be enjoyable per se, but people had paid good money to watch something that would enhance their humanity. This was not challenging, it was punishing.

Perhaps most infuriating is the insistence that this is attracting new audiences, a triumph for access. No evangelising opera fan in their right mind would choose this to win over a newcomer to opera.

Saskia Bibb

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