The climate activist was tired. Protests at the house of Shell’s chief executive had led to little more than free cookies and the police being called to break things up. The same thing had happened the week before. And the week before that. And the week before that.
“I don’t wanna be perfect,” they screamed into a loudspeaker in Ellen Reid and Roxie Perkins’s “The Shell Trial.” “I just don’t wanna die,” the activist added, with an expletive for emphasis.
It was a moment of one person speaking for many, and for “The Shell Trial” itself, which premiered at the Dutch National Opera on Saturday. (Among the commissioners is Opera Philadelphia, where it will travel in a future season.) A Brechtian cri de coeur about climate change and complicity, this is an ambitious, passionate show that seems more interested in being heard — in truly reaching its audience — than in being an impeccably crafted work of art.
Finding new ways to make old points, and powerfully laying out a vision for a future in which the world changes but we do not, “The Shell Trial” has much to admire. Remarkable, too, is the effort of the Dutch National Opera, which has taken a major step toward operating as a carbon-neutral house with this staging and its Green Deal, an initiative to weave sustainability into its productions, limit travel and calculate ways to offset its carbon footprint.
Opera in the past century has become globalized in a way that, unsurprisingly, has made it a target of activists. The Dutch National Opera, like the creators of “The Shell Trial,” views climate change as an ethical issue as well as a political one. And as the company does its part to help, the wider industry should take note.
“The Shell Trial” is based on a play by Anoek Nuyens and Rebekka de Wit that was a response to Shell being sued in the Netherlands by an environmental group for its role in the climate crisis. Shell was found guilty in 2021; it is appealing the decision, and the next trail is set to begin on April 2.
It’s rare for opera to deal with history so recent that it’s not quite history. Even Reid and Perkins’s spiritual predecessors, the creators of so-called CNN operas like “Nixon in China” and “The Death of Klinghoffer,” had some distance from their subjects. (Perkins’s libretto, with punctuations of specificity amid poetic meditation, shares a welcome sensibility with Alice Goodman’s texts for “Nixon” and “Klinghoffer.”) But current events are incidental to this work’s larger questions about blame.
Characters with the kind of allegorical names you would encounter in a Handel oratorio, like the Law, the Government and the Artist, have their say in the first part of “The Shell Trial,” and no one accepts responsibility for climate change. The Law believes it should reflect the world, not save it. The Government doesn’t think people should expect policy to step in for their individual failures. The C.E.O. is just giving consumers what they want.
Then there are those who feel like collateral damage: the pilot and field worker who don’t want to lose their jobs, the history teacher who despairs over the past violence that has made her life of modern convenience possible, the climate refugee who doesn’t want to play a part in any of this.
This may seem like a lot to cover, but things move quickly and smoothly, in part because of the work’s oratorio-like structure, in part because of Gable Roelofsen and Romy Roelofsen’s direction. With the orchestra onstage, an ensemble of silent Elders and, eventually, a children’s chorus drawn from local schools and community groups, there are lot of performers in this production. But scenes don’t feel crowded or unwieldy, even when there’s no clear idea of what to do with the Elders and their out-of-place, ritualistic movement, by Nita Liem.
In Davy van Gerven’ s scenic design, the orchestra pit has been covered, creating a thrust stage that pushes the drama into the auditorium. At first, the set looks simple, with action unfolding in front of an immense wall made to look like white marble; it could be a courtroom or a mausoleum. But the wall comes apart and retracts, making room for climactic spectacle. Jean Kalman’s lighting keeps the audience members lit, never fully separated from what they’re seeing — not that they could be, with performers often staring outward and asking questions like, “What did you do?”
Those performers are distinct as singers and characters, particularly the elegant and commanding soprano Lauren Michelle, as both the Artist and the Law, and Anthony León, who bent his Italianate tenor sound to comic and characterful effect as the Consumer. But in Reid’s score, many of the roles are communicated with similar vocal writing, which, while always lovely, can wear over time and clash with the libretto’s intensity and rhetoric.
“The Shell Trial” is stylistically diverse, like Reid and Perkins’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Prism,” an opera about the indelible minutiae and trauma of sexual assault. Here, there are occasional lapses into the obvious as in the seductive, ironized politesse given to the C.E.O. (fittingly charming as sung by Audun Iversen). More problematic, though, is when the vocal and orchestral writing become disentangled, turning the instruments into mere accompaniment, with oom-pah-pah underscoring or atmospheric mood better suited to a soundtrack.
Reid is at her best when she conjures consumerism and online shopping by turning thoughts and the sight of ads into a fractured, manic ostinato, repeating a cycle of desire and commerce. Similarly, “Doom Scroll” passages unfurl so quickly and chaotically that the busy orchestra flattens, brilliantly, into a kind of white noise.
While the score may be uneven, what seems more important is its effectiveness. And it achieves that in its haunting final scene. A chorus of singing children process from the back of the auditorium, arriving at a sadly beautiful lament as they step onstage.
That alone could induce a pang of guilt, but then they begin to resemble the adults from earlier. And when they yell words like “deny,” it’s inherently more unsettling, and moving. More disturbing still is the closing tableau, as the children become a vision of the future. The C.E.O. is now played by a girl who may look different from the white, adult male executive, but who behaves exactly like him.
The score ends on a silent measure and with these directions: “Before we reach any conclusion, the light goes out. The future is uncertain. And that’s hopeful. For now.” But on Saturday, the children gathered at the front of the stage and lay down in sleeping bags, like a new generation of climate refugees. There were not enough sleeping bags to go around, though, and the future C.E.O. had the last one. She held it high while a little girl repeatedly jumped and failed to grab it.
By then, I had stopped paying attention to the music.
The Shell Trial
Through March 21 at the Dutch National Opera, Amsterdam; operaballet.nl.
