One soprano, two gods, and a shared refusal to give up on the world.
Two thirty-minute chamber operas, two very different registers of climate anxiety, one earnest, one arch. Together they make for an efficient, occasionally uneven, but never dull hour at the Arcola.
After My Breath, a love letter to Greta Thunberg opens with soprano Emily Thorner in a green dress on a small raised platform dusted with fake grass, the kind of DIY-boho staging that suits its subject rather well. Across the opera’s six scenes, Thorner sheds and layers costume as Greta ages: the green dress gives way to a yellow anorak, then to a patchy, cobbled-together life jacket, each change marking a shift in register from girlhood to global figurehead. It’s a costume arc that understands its own limitations as nothing pretends to couture and that scrappiness becomes part of the point.
The piece tracks Thunberg from her first solitary school strike in 2018 through to the UN podium and beyond, tracing a voice finding its volume. Composer-librettist Lisa Logan resists the temptation to bring the story fully up to date, there’s no mention of Thunberg’s more recent activism around Palestine, closing instead on a gesture towards ongoing endurance. It’s a strange place to make the cut, as we know where the story is going next, and at that point, the failure to do so feels less an exercise in self-restraint and more one of evasion, an unwillingness to follow the voice to its ultimate conclusion. The rest, as they say, is history; it’s just history the opera would rather leave off-stage.
Logan’s score builds convincingly from whisper to declaration, borrowing textures from Mozart, Puccini and Bizet without ever feeling like pastiche, and Thorner has the stamina and clarity to hold a solo work of this length together. The libretto occasionally tips into the didactic “you promise tomorrow while selling today” lands with the blunt satisfaction of a placard slogan but the refrain of “this is a movement, not a moment” earns its repetition by the time the piece reaches it.
Eden 2.0 is the funnier, looser cousin. Two gods, draped in white and eyes lined in white eyeshadow, pluck three humans from across history: a philosopher swathed like a Greek statue, a nineteenth-century industrialist buttoned into a sharp suit, and a politician from a post-climate-collapse future, and set them the task of designing a world that survives. The anachronism jokes do a lot of the comic lifting (a future politician marvelling at the ancient miracle of contact lense). Composer William Gardner and librettist Alexia Peniguel let the piece end on a note of stubborn hope rather than despair, as the philosopher drags the last remaining human off to see what’s over the hill.
Neither production is mega-polished. This is small-scale opera, staged with the visible seams of limited budget and quick changes but it wears those rough edges fairly comfortably. What holds the evening together is the shared bet that climate grief and climate absurdity can sit in the same double bill without cancelling each other out. It’s a sincere and occasionally very funny hour, and if neither half quite resolves the crisis it’s staring at, that’s rather the point – nobody else has managed it either.
After My Breath / Eden 2.0: A Double Bill runs at Arcola Theatre, London until 18th July.