Offred Reframed: The Adaptation from Novel to Opera

How often do you enter your neighbourhood bookstore ... and find a woman excitedly telling the cashier about the dress rehearsal for an opera she'd just attended, and buying the novel that inspired the work?

T. Bernstein

Introduction

Imagine this task: you want to adapt a three-hundred-page novel into a music drama of no more than two and a half hours! Statistically speaking, you'll have to cover almost two pages of the novel for every minute of music drama. Indeed the majority of opera libretti rely on the adaptation of an existing literary source, such as spoken drama, novels, novellas, chronicles, and fairy tales and are therefore dependent on the librettist's skill to cut and summarize. However, you not only want an opera to contain the major plot elements of the book, you want it to shift between action and contemplation in order to create a gripping experience for the audience in the theatre.¹ Given these challenges to creating a successful libretto, never mind composing the music or designing and mounting the production, Margaret Atwood might be forgiven for harbouring some trepidation about seeing her novel adapted to the operatic stage: 'I had a brief, nightmarish vision of a line of high-kicking handmaids revealing their beige, utilitarian undergarments while singing some variation of The Anvil Chorus' ('For God').

However, Danish composer Poul Ruders pursued his vision. During their first encounter, Atwood remembers him saying: 'As soon as I read this book, I saw it as an opera!' Atwood recalls that 'he wanted to do The Handmaid's Tale and nothing but The Handmaid's Tale, and if he couldn't do The Handmaid's Tale, he wouldn't do any opera at all' ('For God'). The composer's single-mindedness may sound surprising, but Ruders himself explains why he thought the novel 'the perfect operatic subject': 'It has everything. Suppressed emotion, illicit sex, violence and, most of all, incredible tenderness. Plus all those ostentatious things like processions, ceremonial impregnations, public hangings' (Morrison, 17).

Once the composer's determination secured copyright for using the novel, it was Elaine Padmore, then opera director of the Royal Danish Theatre, who realized that for the opera to succeed, 'it will need one hell of a librettist' (Morrison, 17). Thanks to Padmore, the experienced writer and West End performer Paul Bentley became involved: '"He is a real theatre animal," says Ruders. "Because he performs so much himself, he knows, for instance, how long a character might take to walk upstage. His libretto is jammed with stage directions"' (Morrison, 17). As well 'he knows how to communicate sung text across an orchestra' (Christiansen).

Composer Poul Ruders and librettist Paul Bentley achieved the feat of reducing the complex novel to a manageable piece of music drama. The opera's world premiere on 6 March 2000 and consecutive performances at the Royal Danish Theatre, Copenhagen, were 'an enormous success ... no less a personage than Queen Margarethe went to see it four times in as many months' (Christiansen). The cd of the premiere released on the Dacapo label was nominated for two Grammy Awards and in 2002 received the Cannes Classical Award for the best work by a living composer.² From having attended a performance by the Minnesota Opera in Minneapolis as well as the dress rehearsal and two performances of the Toronto production of the Canadian Opera Company, I can only conclude that the realization of the work as devised by the director and dramaturge Phyllida Lloyd, the production designer Peter McKintosh, and the artistic team led by conductor Richard Bradshaw makes for a thrilling night out in the theatre.

After the world premiere production in Denmark, the opera has seen three more productions internationally. The English National Opera created the first English-language production with seven performances at London's Colliseum between 3 April and 2 May 2003. Phyllida Lloyd, director of the world premiere, led...