A glimpse of a future 300 years hence – with the last woman on the planet soon to be swept away by the ultimate flood – is what convinces a group of women that the patriarchy has failed. They determine to act together against the inevitability of doomsday. The sentiment of writer/director Melanie Wilson’s new piece for Fuel Theatre – premiered at the Wales Festival of Voice – could hardly be stronger. But the title is a misnomer: this is not opera, more a series of declamatory tableaux with incidental music. No matter that this is the most urgent issue of our age, not sci-fi – it simply doesn’t engage dramatically.
In Fly Davis’s design, a massive disc high up appears to be a blackened sun, symbolic of environmental apocalypse, but as the lighting changes it’s revealed as the section of a weather station, refuge of Kate Huggett’s Aphra, the last woman. CO2 is at toxic level; video material depicts shockingly devastated landscapes. Yet the deliberations of the 10 women on stage below, their identities and convictions representing global consensus, are slow.
The music, for which Katarina Glowicka is credited as co-composer, mixes folk-like elements with space-age sound, but even the harmonically more challenging choruses come over as incantatory platitudes. Aphra re-emerges as a green goddess but, as a manifesto for eco-revolution, this allegory stirs neither heart nor mind in the way that is desperately needed.
• At the Wales Millennium Centre’s Festival of Voice, Cardiff, until 12 June. Then touring until 24 June.
