What is the concept behind James MacMillan work “Parthenogenesis” at the Linbury Studio Theater?”
James MacMillan’s opera tells the bizarre story of a young German woman caught up in the Allied bombing of Hanover in 1944, who subsequently gave birth to a daughter apparently without sexual intercourse having taken place. The premise of the piece, as its title suggests, is an instance of virgin birth, presumably induced by shock, “irrespective of its documentary truth or falsehood”, as librettist Michael Symmons Roberts cautiously puts it in his programme note for this new production by Katie Mitchell. The action takes place at two different times in two distinct places, both presented realistically in Vicki Mortimer’s designs. In the centre of the stage, Anna, the daughter born to the bomb-traumatised Kristel, lies dying of cancer in a Hanover hospital ward in 1968, trying to come to terms with her identity as her mother’s clone. In her imagination we see her mother’s flat in 1943, where Kristel engages in a duet with the opera’s third character, a “fallen angel” called Bruno, whose
