Death row opera ‘deals with the very essence of morality, judgement and conscience’

“If you want to experience contemporary opera at its most compelling, harrowing and intensely delivered”, said Richard Morrison in The Times, go and see English National Opera’s “stunning” new production of Jake Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking”. First staged in the US in 2000, and based on Sister Helen Prejean’s 1993 memoir about her work with prisoners on death row in Louisiana, the opera focuses on a composite character, a murderer and rapist known here as Joseph De Rocher, from his brutal crime to his execution by lethal injection. Plainly, this is not the “cheeriest way to spend three hours”. But opera proves the “perfect vehicle for a drama that deals with the very essence of morality, judgement and conscience”.

This true story was turned into a powerful, Oscar-winning film in 1995. With a libretto by Terrence McNally, the opera “packs an even bigger emotional punch”, said Ivan Hewett in The Telegraph. In this version, we witness the crime itself – the murder of a young couple as they are making love in their car late one night. Staged in lurid half-lighting, it is “the most shocking spectacle I’ve ever seen on the operatic stage”. But it serves an important dramatic purpose, making us withhold sympathy from the condemned prisoner, and question Sister Helen’s wisdom. The result is a rich work full of “moral ambiguities”, and ENO’s staging, by director Annilese Miskimmon, is a “triumph”.

From the “undulating, surging” overture onwards, Heggie demonstrates a “confident control of dramatic momentum”, said David Jays in London’s The Standard. He uses Southern gospel alongside “conventional hymnody and lushly orchestrated passages that wouldn’t be out of place in a 1950s Hollywood melodrama”. It’s a “masterly score”, said Clive Paget in The Guardian – propulsive and supportive by turns – faultlessly played by the ENO Orchestra under Kerem Hasan. The singing, too, is first-rate. Christine Rice “brings huge emotional reserves” to the part of Sister Helen, and sings with unforced refinement. Michael Mayes conveys power and pathos as De Rocher, see-sawing between rage and despair.

London Coliseum, WC2. Until 18 November

by Jason Burke

Today, it is easy to forget how “brutal and random” the 1970s could be, said Hugh Thomson in The Spectator. This was the first age of transnational terrorism, when radicals and revolutionaries deployed new, often deadly tactics in the hope of furthering their goals. They carried out plane hijackings, kidnappings and massacres – from the 1972 Munich Olympics atrocity to the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979 – and set off bombs around the globe, “from the Tower of London to Washington to Singapore”.

In this “superb and monumental” book, Jason Burke details the main movements – including the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Baader-Meinhof Gang and “our own IRA” – and offers “sharp vignettes of the principal combatants”, among them Leila Khaled, the Palestinian “Grenade Girl” (who helped hijack planes in 1969 and 1970), and the “extraordinary” Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, aka Carlos the Jackal, a Venezuelan terrorist-for-hire. Burke, a foreign correspondent for nearly 30 years, “brings a wealth of experience” to his tale, which is “epic”, lively and well written.

Many of the terrorists of the early 1970s were over-educated “countercultural types”, said Pratinav Anil in The Guardian. “The German women of the Red Army Faction mixed dialectical materialism with topless sunbathing in Amman, to the chagrin of their Palestinian hosts.” Kozo Okamoto, of the Japanese Red Army, was an eccentric, cherry blossom-obsessed Marxist. But as Burke shows, a “marked shift” took place in the late 1970s, when such “secular, left-leaning” figures gave way to Islamist extremists, said Richard Vinen in Literary Review. The new terrorists who emerged “felt nothing in common with the European left”, “placed little value on their own lives”, and embraced ever-more extreme tactics, including, eventually, suicide bombings.

The one flaw of this otherwise “magisterial” book is Burke’s failure to define precisely what “revolutionists” are, said Barney Horner in The New Statesman. “This becomes a problem with the chapters, fascinating though they are, on Israeli state terrorism”: Mossad’s “excursions across western Europe and North Africa” are hard to depict as the “labours of revolutionary struggle”. Burke could also have devoted more space to the “power plays within Palestinian factions”, said Simon Sebag Montefiore in The Times. Still, for the most part this book is a “fascinating chronicle of lethal Middle Eastern conspirators and absurd Western killers”. I found it “unputdownable”.

Classically trained actress who starred in Fawlty Towers

Prunella Scales, who has died aged 93, was a serious dramatic actress known among other things for being the first person to play a fictionalised Queen Elizabeth II on the British stage, said Michael Coveney in The Guardian. It was considered a bold move when, in 1988, Richard Eyre decided to stage, at the National Theatre, Alan Bennett’s “A Question of Attribution”, about Anthony Blunt, surveyor of the Queen’s pictures (and a Soviet spy): theatres had shied away from plays featuring a living monarch. But Scales was praised for perfectly capturing the Queen’s “essence” and “enigma” as well as her voice and mannerisms, and it seems her performance did not go unnoticed at the Palace. In 1992, she was appointed CBE. At the investiture, as the Queen hooked on the insignia, she told Scales: “I suppose you think you should be doing this.” 

Yet for all her work on the stage, Scales was best known as Sybil Fawlty, the “elaborately coiffured” harridan married to the hotelier Basil (John Cleese) in the BBC sitcom “Fawlty Towers”, said The Telegraph. The series was written by Cleese and his then wife Connie Booth; but Scales did much to shape the character. It was her idea, for instance, that Sybil, with her laugh likened to a “drain-clearing device”, should be a little lower on the social scale than her maddening, “manic, blustering” husband. “Their on-screen chemistry was perfect,” said The Times, Basil would address Sybil in a “faux romantic way” – “my little nest of vipers” – while she’d spit back: “You never get it right, do you? You’re either crawling all over them [the guests], licking their boots or spitting poison at them like some benzedrine puff adder.” “Fawlty Towers” ran for only 12 episodes, over two series broadcast four years apart, said Coveney. Yet “Scales’ recriminatory warpath cry of ‘Basil!’ rang across the decades without lumbering her with typecasting. She was far too good for that.” 

Prunella Illingworth was born in 1932; her father John Illingworth was a salesman, her mother, Catherine Scales, was an actress. She named her daughter after a play, “Prunella”, that she had once been in. Pru, as she preferred to be known, grew up in a rented farmhouse in Surrey with no gas or electricity but lots of books, and won a bursary to a private school before moving to bombed-out London in the late 1940s to train at the Old Vic Theatre School. She made her professional debut at the Bristol Old Vic in 1951, and was soon being directed by the likes of Tyrone Guthrie in the West End. After a season at the RSC, she joined the Oxford Playhouse Company in 1957, and toured Europe as Olivia in “Twelfth Night” and Hermia in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. 

Her big-screen appearances ranged from “Hobson’s Choice” (1954) to “Howards End” (1992). On TV, she got a big break when she was cast as Richard Briers’ wife in the sitcom “Marriage Lines”. Other TV hits included “Mapp & Lucia”, and a series of ads for Tesco, in which she played the fussing mother of a perpetually exasperated Jane Horrocks. “Shall I put the bag in the car for you,” a shop assistant asks Horrocks. “No,” she snaps, “she can get in herself.” Scales, a committed left-winger, said the fees from Tesco funded her work in regional theatre, of which she was a great champion. It was a passion she shared with her husband, the actor Timothy West, whom she had married in 1963. One of their other great loves was for Britain’s waterways. They had, with their sons Joseph and Sam, spent happy family holidays on canal boats, and from the 2010s they made several series of the charming TV show “Great Canal Journeys”, though she was by then suffering from vascular dementia. “She can’t remember things very well,” West said, “but you don’t have to remember things on the canal. You can just enjoy things as they happen – so it’s perfect for her.” He died last year. Her children survive her.