Tom Green’s music-theatre piece has undergone several changes since it began life as a song cycle on poems from Carol Ann Duffy’s collection, The World’s Wife. At the request of the Ragazze Quartet, Green first planned a concert work for soprano and string quartet, but that soon morphed into a theatre piece for the same combination; in that form it received its first performances under the auspices of the Welsh National Opera in 2017. Since then Green has reworked The World’s Wife for the transgender baritone Lucia Lucas, cutting one scene and adding an epilogue based on recordings of interviews with the performers and presenting it in a new staging by Jorinde Keesmaat.
Duffy’s poems give voices to the women of history, real and mythic, who have been overshadowed by their male partners, and Green sets 10 of them, including Mrs Aesop (“By Christ, he could bore for Purgatory”), Salome (“I’d done it before and doubtless I’ll do it again, sooner or later”) and Mrs Icarus (“He’s a total, utter, absolute, Grade A pillock”). The tone ranges from the absurd to the bleakly dark, from Mrs Beast entertaining her fellow fairytale characters for a poker night, to Queen Herod fearing for the life of her baby.
With subtle electronic enhancements of the quartet and the use of loop pedals that allow the singer to create the multi-voice effect of an ensemble, Green creates a wonderfully varied response to the texts, which Lucas delivers in everything from speech to the most powerful arioso. Apparently the score is almost entirely derived from the works of female composers across five centuries, from Barbara Strozzi and Francesca Caccini to Clara Schumann and Elisabeth Lutyens. Those sources only occasionally become obvious: Queen Herod is introduced with what must be a reference to Schumann, while a beautiful polyphonic passage introducing Medusa has to come from Strozzi. Yet nothing ever seems arch or contrived, and the writing for the voice and the strings was fabulously assured.
Certainly, when performed with the authority that Lucas and the Ragazze brought to it, the 90-minute work seems more than strong enough to stand on its own musical feet without the need for any theatrical trappings. But Keesmaat’s production was never intrusive, and singer and quartet were as committed to what they were asked to do as they were to the music. The recorded epilogue seemed to me an unnecessary addition, and struck the only false note in that rare thing nowadays, a totally successful music-theatre piece.
