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3 hours ago
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Sometimes it feels as though British folklore gets stranger the closer you look at it. The Devil’s Den, an hour-long opera with words and music by Isabella Gellis, is certainly one of the odder shows to have been hosted by Opera North. Following a try-out at the Nevill Holt festival in summer 2024, it was being fully staged for the first time here, courtesy of Shadwell Opera and the Sheffield City Morris.
Morris dancing in opera? That was being claimed as a first. The dancers filled the interludes between scenes like a hanky-waving Greek chorus, their bells and sticks adding another layer to Gellis’s music.
The Devil’s Den is a neolithic monument in Wiltshire with legends attached to it involving the devil, who is desperate to topple its capstone; a talking rabbit who translates the devil’s squeaks and grunts; and a fire-breathing toad that may or may not be summoned by a child running round the stones seven times, depending on whether that child is bad or good.
Staged here in simple and effective style by Jack Furness, with a set involving just a circle of greensward and three large imitation rocks forming a dolmen (unavoidable shades of Spinal Tap), Gellis’s opera is the story of a good child whom everyone decides is bad. And everyone includes the audience: the child is put on trial by the lavishly garlanded druid, who teaches us a song of condemnation and gets us to repeat it in almost ritual fashion. It’s like being harangued by a cross between Gareth Malone and a mulberry bush.
And yet give it a chance and there’s the feel of a modern mystery play to it all – with a touching moment when we stop singing and the child is still trying to block us out with a song about a butterfly she made up earlier. In fact, the whole piece is a bundle of contradictions.
What’s not in question is the rewardingly agile, transparent quality of Gellis’s music for the 15-strong instrumental ensemble, who play, hum, whistle and warble, conducted by Finnegan Downie Dear. It’s often witty, especially when unseen characters “talk” via solo instruments that rumble, tootle or squeak like Charley Says. The cast is first rate. Lotte Betts-Dean is the ambiguous devil, who squeals and beatboxes in an attempt to communicate, with Nicholas Morris similarly vivid as her sinister rabbit sidekick and Ossian Huskinson in booming voice as the druid. Jennifer France is luxury casting as the child, hitting even the highest notes diamond bright.
The Devil’s Den could use some further tightening: some scenes feel too long, perhaps unsurprisingly given that it is Gellis’s first full-length stage work. But it would be a shame if this eccentric opera didn’t get to crop up on any other morris dancers’ patch.
