Written on Skin review: sex, murder and cannibalism at the Royal Opera House

George Benjamin’s Written on Skin is a work of compelling fascination, all the more so in that it is elusive and possibly wilfully puzzling. I want to see it again as soon as possible, and of how many new operas can that be said? Actually, of three that have been premièred at the Royal Opera in the past decade — Adès’s The Tempest, Birtwistle’s The Minotaur and now this, though it has already been performed in Europe. Three apparent masterpieces of opera from England in a decade is impressive, indeed unprecedented. And they are all quite different, with Skin being the most opaque, though the experience of sitting through it, just over an hour and a half, mercifully without an interval, may be the most intense. The text by Martin Crimp should be read first, not because the words aren’t easy to hear — Benjamin makes sure in his orchestration of that — but because, although the language is lucid, there is so much going on.

The action takes place eight centuries ago, but it is told from the point of view of the present, and the characters, primarily the Boy, the Protector and his wife Agnès, frequently include the narrative device of ‘says the Boy’, etc., though I am not completely convinced that this adds to the piece as much as it confuses. The Boy is recruited to write for the Protector a celebration of his (the Protector’s) greatness, on skin; but things get complicated, and Agnès, intrigued with the Boy’s work, becomes more intrigued by the Boy, and they have a brief, extremely intense sexual relationship, the upshot of which is that the Protector murders the Boy and forces Agnès to eat his cooked heart, which she is delighted to do. That is the bare skeleton, if that, of the story.