Last Saturday, I headed to the Phoenix Picturehouse in Jericho to watch an HD Livestream of The Hours, a stunning new opera by Kevin Puts and Greg Pierce, straight from the Metropolitan Operahouse. With the comfiest seats in town and a supremely useful informational seat, Phoenix made the three-hour-plus experience feel like a luxury rather than an endurance sport: although that was further assisted by the excellent quality of the show itself.
Based on Michael Cunningham’s 1998 novel and Stephen Daldry’s 2002 film adaptation of the same name, The Hours marks the return of long-beloved soprano Renee Fleming. Fleming was central to the development of the production, after retiring from playing ingenue roles five years ago and in effect leaving the Met stage entirely, she only wanted to return for a role that allowed her to be centre-stage, at the stage of life she’s now in. Collaborating with Puts and Pierce to get the ball rolling, she was soon joined by fellow opera veterans Kelli O’Hara and Joyce DiDonato as the show's other two heroines.
The Hours, for those unfamiliar, follows three women living in different eras and places (1923 London, 1949 Los Angeles, and 1999 New York) and the way art and unmet desires link their lives together. All three have ostensibly supportive but ineffectual partners and issues that they’d rather not face.
Set over the course of a single day, the story is heavily referential to Mrs Dalloway. Our 1920s heroine is Virginia Woolf herself, stowed away in a stultifying London suburb, trying to write the novel while drowning in depression and migraines. 1940s housewife Laura Brown struggles with her sexuality and reads Mrs Dalloway as an escape from her pretty but desperately unfulfilling life with her husband and young son. And at the turn of the century, Clarissa Vaughan (named, we are told, after Woolf’s heroine) is - naturally - throwing a party, for her dear friend (and unrequited love) Richard (Kyle Ketelson), a morose poet dying of AIDs.
Fleming does a phenomenal job bringing her character to life: polished and nineties-modern in her crisp white skirt suit, Clarissa is a long-term New Yorker and literary editor, living with her easygoing partner Sally (Denyce Graves). Played with brisk femininity, you come to understand this character’s use of pragmatic optimism as armour against all manner of disappointments and unmet needs.
Meanwhile, homemaker Laura’s discontent is far closer to the surface. Presenting a contented facade in front of her son Ritchie (Kai Edgar) and husband Dan (Brandon Cedel), she internalises all of her own doubts and needs until they curdle into shame. O’Hara gives a beautifully layered performance, at once hopeful, desperate and self-flagellating.
As Woolf, Joyce DiDonato had a difficult task ahead of her: conveying inner turmoil and pain via the very outward-projecting medium of opera. It’s here the production perhaps misses a few tricks. While DiDonato is supremely skilled at conveying this multi-layered and erudite character, the frailty and fear Woolf’s purported to be feeling never quite come to life. Instead, she seems fiercely alive and in control, which makes other characters' concerns for her fall a bit flat at times.
The way the three stories echo one another is crucial to the piece. In the novel, Cunningham did this with a tone of voice, and in the film, Philip Glass’ grave and intense soundtrack acted as a thread weaving through all three pieces. Puts’ and Pierce’s opera takes this a step further: the medium allows for blending and marbling the three stories into one another in ways that film and novel do not.
The characters harmonize across decades, and in one striking set piece, the suspended upper stage is occupied by Laura absorbed in a copy of Mrs Dalloway, while beneath, we see Virginia penning the very words she’s reading.
Praise must go to Tom Pye’s set design, which uses a series of small, complete sets to convey three very different time periods: warm stately sepia tones for the 1920s, candy-coated technicolour for the 40s and cool minimalism for the nineties, all chrome and exposed brickwork. The music subtly shifts to match this, most noticeably with the jazzy, swinging sounds in Laura’s Pleasantville-esque 40s.
The ominous chorus also plays a key part in how the story is told. In the mesmerising opening sequence, the lights ripple over them like water as they repeat a single line - ‘The flowers!’ - which becomes increasingly distorted. This serves as a haunting reference to Woolf’s suicide by drowning, which looms over the piece.
Throughout, the chorus is like a collection of living props, embodiments of the characters' thoughts, fears and doubts. When Clarissa visits Richard’s grim apartment, they lay slumped half off the platform of the stage, sprawled like corpses, likely in reference to the countless casualties already lost to the AIDs epidemic by 1999. In Woolf’s scenes, they serve as both muses and demons, fervently scribbling in notebooks, and then tearing out pages.
At well over two hours long, the first half could probably be streamlined - there’s a scene at a florist in which the chorus twirl fresh flowers to stunning effect but which offers little beyond aesthetic appeal, and there’s some repetition in each heroine’s librettos that could likely be trimmed. But this is a minor quibble.
The scenes between the cynical, droll Richard and ebullient Clarissa are some of the strongest in the piece - you understand their decades-long enmeshment and romantic - if pointedly non-sexual - connection.
Clarissa runs into Richard’s former lover Louis (William Burden) at one point, and the two reminisce on a rose-tinted summer the three spent together on the coast: an idyllic beach scene is projected onto a curtain behind the performers. ‘He wanted me for my body and you for everything else,’ Louis tells Clarissa semi-bitterly, and the curtain falls unceremoniously to the floor, the reverie over.
These characters all feel their struggles are impossible to fully face, let alone overcome, and they each choose their own method of escape. Crucial to the story is how art can reach across time to offer a compassionate presence. At one point Richard reflects on his hopes for his sole novel. ‘I just wanted to create something good and true, it didn’t have to be great,’ he says. ‘Maybe a young girl, feeling utterly hopeless, would read it and it would encourage her enough she’d stay alive to write a poem.’
This cycle of solidarity through art and community across years and continents is so core to the formation of the queer community and forms the real through-line between these three stories. The distance in time between Laura Brown reading Virginia Woolf’s work is not much different to that of someone reading Cunningham’s 1998 novel now. The highest grace one can reach in this particular world is awareness. In the end, the piece avoids easy conclusions in favour of delicate empathy. The result is a sumptuous, and often deeply moving, night at the opera.