Given its European premiere at this year’s Grimeborn festival, Tarik O’Regan’s monodrama The Wanton Sublime is essentially a religious work, albeit an unconventional one, that meditates on the annunciation and the psychology of revelation. Using a text by American poet Anna Rabinowitz, it reimagines the Virgin Mary as engaged in an angry confrontation with the God who has chosen her to be integral to his purpose. “Why me? Why now?” she asks. “What would you do if I refused?” The underlying point, integral to much mystic literature, is that divine intervention has the bewildering potential to shatter lives and identities.
Written for the American mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn, O’Regan’s score brings bluesy rebelliousness and Monteverdian lyricism into close proximity. Mary’s arguments are with herself as well as with God, and Chinn sings against a playback of her own voice singing sacred texts, as Robert Shaw’s understated production charts her transformation from streetwise elegance to a more pliant, albeit resentful figure in lapis lazuli blue. There’s fine playing from the Orpheus Sinfonia under Andrew Griffiths. But it was a major mistake to perform the work in the Arcola’s cramped Studio 2, where the ensemble frequently obliterates Chinn’s voice, and with it the all-important text.
Chinn is better served by the companion piece and profane antithesis, Peter Maxwell Davies’s unaccompanied 1981 monologue The Medium, in which the mind of a fraudulent psychic, whose spirit guides are projections of her own past traumas, unravels with horrifying force. At 50 minutes, the piece is too long, but Chinn does the transformation from demure widow to obscene maniac with unsparing veracity. It works well in the space, too: we’re eyeball-to-eyeball with her most of the time and the result is unsettling in the extreme.
- At Arcola theatre until 29 August. Box Office: 020-7503 1646.
