The Stage

Doctor Atomic

Published Thursday 26 February 2009 at 15:55 by George Hall

Premiered in San Francisco in 2005, John Adams’ third large-scale opera reaches the UK. Like its predecessors Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, Doctor Atomic selects a subject from modern history - in this case, the testing of the atom bomb in the New Mexico desert in 1945. The chief characters are the scientists involved - primarily Robert Oppenheimer, trenchantly sung here by Gerald Finley, and Edward Teller, delivered with equivalent authority by Brindley Sherratt, plus their military colleagues, led by Jonathan Veira’s dominating General Groves. Humanising the lengthy discussions of scientific data and weather reports are an intimate scene between Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty, resiliently sung by Sasha Cooke, and an intervention by their Native American servant, Pasqualita, played by Meredith Arwady, who sings a lullaby to her baby. A Tewa Indian chorus observes the activities at the Los Alamos base.

The main difference between Doctor Atomic and its predecessors is the librettist. Whereas Alice Goodman was able to give the first two range and resonance with her poetic texts, Peter Sellars’ compilation of extracts from historic documents has a dusty, unnatural feel. Even the poems quoted by the characters - the John Donne setting that ends Act I is the score’s high point - merely underline its artificiality.

Designed by Julian Crouch, Penny Woolcock’s production works hard to keep the piece alive, but neither she nor conductor Lawrence Renes can stop the result from seeming portentous and dull.