Unborn in America: A Cabaret Opera

When an opera opens with ‘I am your dead, unborn baby’, it’s clear that anything goes for its composers – in this case, Luke Styles and librettist-director Peter Cant.

The line is delivered by Ziggy, a leather-clad, cabaret-singing foetus, who entertains fellow abortions in an afterlife club called The Petri Dish. Ziggy is played by mezzo Jessica Walker who, despite trailing an umbilical cord attached to her microphone, makes an engaging host, switching effortlessly between the requirements of vocal style – from jazz to cabaret and classical.

Cant’s direction is itself a slick cabaret routine, one confidently pulled off by the cast: tenor Andrew Dickinson, a wistful devotee of Ziggy; Lucy Stevens and Robert Gildon in black body suits and tights, who shimmy on for routines as drugs or for turns as Oprah Winfrey. Meanwhile, Ziggy experiences a meteoric rise through celebrity to presidency, determinedly mocking the gravity of the debate.

The show is purportedly a satire on the emotive language employed by the ultra-conservative American pro-life lobby, and by drawing such unsympathetic characters as Ziggy’s uncaring prostitute mother and unscrupulous stem-cell scientists in China, the show makes a joke of their crude unrepentance.

New music chamber group Ensemble Amorpha (co-producers with OperaUpClose) is a curious assemblage of drum kit, piano, cello and oboe. Here, Styles conducts it nebulously, more an atmospheric, occasionally raucous, accompaniment than structured opera score.

‘From the bin marked “surgical waste”, the only way is up,’ quips Ziggy. The question is: is this funny or, indeed, even satirical? It seems that the show could do with a little more development; it certainly needs to slow down and figure out what it’s trying to say. For the moment, it’s more of an assault by a confident agitprop theatre company than a new voice in opera.