The Stage

The Silent Twins

Published Friday 6 July 2007 at 12:20 by Edward Bhesania

Errolyn Warren’s new opera, which opens this year’s Almeida Festival, is based on the compelling story of the reclusive twins Jennifer and June Gibbons who, after turning to crime, were sentenced in 1982 to 11 years at Broadmoor Hospital. It’s an eerie tale - the sisters communicated almost exclusively with each other, and became both stifled by and yet dependent on each other in extremes.

The first part of the opera relies heavily on flashbacks from earlier in the twins’ lives - a consultation with a bemused doctor, their enrolment on a writing course, losing their virginities in a church on their 18th birthdays. And yet just when you feel you want more of relationship to each other there’s the poignant scene where, having been forced apart in hospital for a period, they are brought together again, only to declare their hatred and then their love for one another .

Wallen’s music - skilfully wrought and freely idiom-crossing - largely makes light of the twins’ situation, with varied set-pieces in the ‘Discomania’ scene (where disco dancing drives subjects to wild violence) and the smoky jazz accompaniment to the ‘Pepsi-Cola Addict’ high-school hero, seduced by his teacher. But the delicately keening wind writing before the end of part one, where the sisters declare their love for each other, and much of their mother Gloria’s writing, is deeply affecting.

Alison Crookendale and Talise Trevigne are well matched vocally as the twins and are well supported, particularly by La Verne Williams as their mother, and especially by Andrew Rees in a number of sharply characterised guises.