Falling down

This week, some 200 years since Goya’s ‘The Disasters of War’, almost 80 years after Picasso’s ‘Guernica’, and over 50 since Malcolm Browne won a Pulitzer for his photograph of a self-immolating Buddhist monk, the British media found itself questioning whether art should, or even could, ever represent the horrors of recent history. It was a conversation that picked minutely over the ethical responsibilities of an opera based on the events of 9/11 — was it too soon? how would the families feel? would it exploit tragedy for drama? — but one whose ceaseless moral whys and wherefores prevented it ever arriving at the only real artistic question: how?

The answer is only partially provided by Tansy Davies’s debut opera Between Worlds, commissioned and staged by ENO at the Barbican Theatre. Correctly predicting the tide of public discussion and opinion, Davies, librettist Nick Drake and director Deborah Warner have created a work that is so determined to be respectful, so careful not to make the wrong sort of statement, that it risks saying nothing at all.