Jake Heggie’s acclaimed Dead Man Walking debuts in London, demanding attention, compassion, and courage in equal measure. Adapted from Sister Helen Prejean’s memoir, the story charts a nun’s journey into the heart of America’s moral contradictions as she becomes the spiritual adviser to a convicted murderer on death row awaiting execution in Louisiana’s Angola Penitentiary. Through her, the viewer is confronted with the question of what forgiveness means when violence has already done its worst. Aside from a searing look at capital punishment, Heggie and librettist Terrence McNally deals with the faith that is stretched taut between compassion for the condemned De Rocher and his family, and the unhealed wounds of the victims’ parents.
The opera’s prologue, starting at teenage romance and ending in rape and murder, is a punch to the gut which only truly takes its deliberately jarring effect once it transitions to the first scene filled with the buoyant singing of the children of Hope House (Sister Helen’s mission). Necessarily so, as this jarring transition is the opera’s moral thesis in miniature: grace and violence coexist in the same world, and art must find the courage to hold both without flinching.
The orchestra, led by the indomitable Kerem Hassan, brings flawlessly timed vigour. There are moments, especially in Act I, when its instrumental force overshadows the singers, whose text and nuance risk being swallowed by sound. Yet this imbalance also supports the opera’s subject of the behemoth weight of moral judgment – what the law enforcement and the victims’ parents pronounce to be absolute justice – against the small, trembling voices of conscience.
Heggie’s score jumps from choral hymns to rock and jazz with electricity. When the chorus swells in the prison waiting room scene – prisoners and children converging from opposite sides of the stage then appearing all together from the other side of the cage bars – the theatre achieves a sense of genuine communion.
The death row inmate who had the poor luck of ending up with the lawyer that couldn’t get him a lesser sentence like his accomplice-brother, shares a laugh with Sister Helen over their shared love of Elvis Presley. Just like that, the mundane seeps into the tragedy. The four grieving parents’ recounting of the last words they said to their child – pouring out in a torrent of “Shut the door”, “Clean your room”, and so on – is most poignantly done.
Michael Mayes as the convict Joseph de Rocher is simply astounding. He embodies carelessness, rage, care, and uninhibited despair by turns through his drawling swampy accent and actions ranging from smoking a cigarette (vape) to counting his push-ups.
At the centre of this London debut stands Christine Rice as an extraordinary Sister Helen, moving through uncertainty, conviction, and despair with unforced sincerity. Her faith is neither naïve nor convenient as she embodies the daunting complexity of belief in a world that has every reason to doubt it.
Alex Eales’s set design can be surprisingly imaginative, particularly the end of Act I which showcases a vending machine in a blaze of lurid yellow light as it inches towards Sister Helen. Fatigued and overwhelmed by her visit with De Rocher, a nun’s quiet act of reaching for a snack becomes something infernal, terrifying. The machine seems to throb with all the rage and despair of the world. What is notable here about Annilese Miskimmon’s direction is the choice to continually involve the dead teenagers over the course of the opera. Behind the vending machine, the dead teenagers and the two condemned brothers appear, indistinguishable from each other in their dejection and bound together in torment.
It is difficult to recount a contemporary opera that feels this necessary. The final curtain, preceded by Sister Helen’s leitmotif “He’ll gather us around”, has the theatre holding its breath in reverence. Heggie and McNally’s work, in this luminous London staging, does not ask whether the viewer believes in redemption. It simply shows its cost.
Composer: Jake Heggie
Librettist: Terrence McNally
Director: Annilese Miskimmon
Conductor: Kerem Hasan
Cast includes: Christine Rice, Michael Mayes, Dame Sarah Connolly, Madeline Boreham, Andrew Manea
Photo credit: Manuel Harlan
Running time: 2h 50m including a 20-minute interval
Showing until 18th November 2025