Five stars for Picture a day like this, George Benjamin’s beguiling, unsettling new opera

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A woman stands alone on a dimly lit stage. Her diminished figure, shoulders slumped, in a simple floral dress, is reflected dully by industrial steel walls on all sides. A single low harp note sounds, and she sings, alone: “No sooner had my child started to speak whole sentences than he had died.”

Picture a day like this, George Benjamin’s eagerly awaited fourth opera with librettist Martin Crimp, opened on Wednesday evening at Aix-en-Provence’s tiny Théâtre du Jeu de Paume. It tells the story of a woman on a quest. If she can find the button from a sleeve of a truly happy person, her child will live.

The etched simplicity of the opening is a signifier for the evening to come — spare, haunting, immediate. Crimp’s words have an old-world, once-upon-a-time lilt to them, but the piece plays in the here-and-now — a fable of loss and anguish for our times.

Picture a day like this is more episodic than any of the pair’s work to date, with each of the seven scenes — stations on the woman’s increasingly desperate journey to find a happy person — a little world of its own: a pair of lovers; a deranged artisan; an arrogant composer; a rich collector; a woman in a magical garden.

The whole has the slick perfection of a piece crafted specifically for exceptional performers. In the role of grieving mother, Marianne Crebassa has a heart-rending directness and vitality. As Zabelle, the woman in the magic garden, Anna Prohaska can convey repressed rage and trauma in every polished note. John Brancy’s two roles as artisan and collector explore all extremes of his remarkable range. Beate Mordal and Cameron Shahbazi are self-satisfied and creepy in their two scenes as lovers and celebrities.

Benjamin conducts the Mahler Chamber Orchestra himself, with taut control and a lush palette of sound colours, his score deft and restrained, its occasional outbursts of passion all the more intense for the careful control of the rest. It is fiendishly clever. 

Daniel Jeanneteau and Marie-Christine Soma’s production sets the action in a bare contemporary space, with sliding screens and scrims serving to divide the space where necessary. There is a ritualistic slowness to the movement, resembling an underwater memory or the trance-like dullness of bereavement.

For Zabelle’s enchanted garden, video artist Hicham Berrada has created an ambivalent scene of blossoming chemical reactions — toxic and vibrant, sinister and fascinating. In its unexpected weirdness, it is a surprisingly visceral intervention in a space that has until then relied on shadowy symbolism, preparing us for a conclusion that is as unexpected as it is ambiguous.

Picture a day like this tackles huge subjects with daring economy of means and eschews the catharsis of an easy resolution. Its impact is unsettling. There is no elation, no triumphant conclusion; there are no easy answers. That takes courage. For all its beguiling beauty, its moments of dark wit and bitter social observation, Picture a day like this remains a voyage beyond all comfort zones. You have been warned.

★★★★★

To July 23, festival-aix.com