Angel’s Bone by Du Yun & Royce Vavrek, English National Opera, The Coliseum, London WC2 | 26 Oct 2026. ⭐⭐⭐ Review by Clare Colvin
Photo credit: Nirah Sanghani
Angel’s Bone
by Du Yin & Royce Vavrek
English National Opera, The Coliseum, London WC2 | 26 Oct 2026
⭐⭐⭐ Review by Clare Colvin
“When an opera writes its own warning.”
Composer Du Yun’s contemporary opera Angel’s Bone arrived with a 18+ warning from ENO about depicting themes of human trafficking and sexual exploitation as well as extreme violence. The action, we are told, further contains strong drug, smoking and alcohol misuse, sexual violence including rape, and death. But the opera, earlier seen in Manchester, ENO’s new part-time home during the summer, initially won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2017 as being innovative, contemporary and socially relevant. So was there a line to observe, and has it been crossed?
Du Yun’s score fuses religious medieval polyphony, punk, electronics, chamber music and cabaret into a heady score to carry a libretto by playwright and filmmaker Royce Vavrek, relating a surrealistic tale about a pair of boy and girl angels who fall wounded to earth and are taken in by a woman, Mrs X.E. and her husband, with the purpose of nursing them back to health, that swiftly becomes sex exploitation instead, as she tells her friends that the angels will bless any living thing.
Mrs X.E., given a storming performance here by Scottish soprano Allison Cook as a voracious consumer, lusts for the angel wings, which are torn from them, leaving only hanging shoulder bones. Husband X.E., resonant baritone Rodney Earl Clarke, also develops a powerful lust, and the angels, imprisoned in a pink porcelain bathroom, are reduced to weeping wrecks, while the adult angels, led by male soprano Keith Pun, watch ineffectively from the sidelines. Meanwhile, three camera operators circulate, creating an overall video of brutality interspersed with pockets of real life.
Art, at its best, functions to provoke, Du Yun believes, but in the process has missed out one essential element; that art at its best should attract rather than repulse. Much of the time in this instance one feels as if one’s being drip fed poison. At the same time the cast put their energy into the project, with honourable mention to the suffering angels, Scottish tenor Matthew McKinney as Boy and Swedish musician and voice actress Mariam Wallentin as Girl Angel. Internationally known Baldur Brönniman returns to conduct the Orchestra of ENO in a vigorous and fully expanded orchestration for the pit of the Coliseum. At one and a half hours sans interval it is a solid piece of sight and sound, even if you need to close your eyes against the flashing lights at the end. And there was a warning.
Conductor: Baldur Brönnimann
Director: Kip Williams
Set & Costume Designer: Marg Howell
Lighting Designer: Jack Knowles
Video Designer: Ash J Woodward
Associate Video Designer: Amanda Tooke
Sound Co-Designers: Dominic Bilkey & Joseph Reiser;
Fight Director: Brad Mendes;
Intimacy Coordinator: Ingrid Mackinnon;
Production pictures: Nirah Sanghani & Tristram Kenton