The Angel Esmeralda
Guildhall School of Music & Drama, Silk Street Theatre, London

A Franciscan friar searches the scrubland of a South Bronx slum for rare plants. A murdered girl’s face appears miraculously on a commercial billboard. A subway entrance billows smoke like an urban hell mouth. A brick wall blossoms with graffiti memorials to dead children.

The images of Don DeLillo’s 1994 short story, The Angel Esmeralda, are aimed with a sniper’s accuracy at the American dream and its waking nightmare. You can see the appeal for composer Lliam Paterson and librettist Pamela Carter in this tale of two nuns confronting murder and an apparent miracle in a rough New York neighbourhood: it’s a concise meditation on faith and life and human suffering. But how do you take an author whose power is all in his prose and translate him into action, song, opera?
Perhaps this is the reason DeLillo has never before been adapted for the opera house. And if Carter and Paterson don’t completely resolve the issue in their debut collaboration commissioned by Scottish Opera, and staged here for the first time by the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, they make some interesting choices along the way.