"I'm Sorry My Story Is in Fragments": Offred's Operatic Counter-Memory (Critical Essay‪)‬

THE CANADIAN OPERA COMPANY Opened its 2004-2005 season to great critical and cultural acclaim with the Canadian premiere of Poul Ruders and Paul Bentley's The Handmaid's Tale (Tjenerindens Fortaelling), an operatic adaptation of Margaret Atwood's 1985 dystopic novel of the same title. Opening an opera season with a contemporary work is a box-office gamble; indeed, this risky decision marked a first for the Canadian Opera Company. And, as Atwood admits, when Ruders first approached her and proposed adapting her novel into opera, she thought, "This person is mad" ("God and Gilead"). But the final product, which received its world premiere on 6 March 2000 with the company that commissioned the work (Royal Danish Opera), demonstrates the fortuitous truth that first thoughts are often wrong. In his 2003 review of the British premiere, Martin Anderson aptly sums up the general enthusiasm for the work, "what a superior piece of theatre it is: music, libretto, direction, stage design, costumes and lighting all coalesce to thrilling effect ... it has been years since I've seen something this good" (39). A reception so positive is rare for contemporary music of any kind, never mind contemporary opera, which has the misfortune of competing for airtime in perhaps the most inflexible canon in classical music. (2) It is also rare for an adaptation of a literary work as famous as The Handmaid's Tale to be lauded so wholeheartedly. As Herbert Lindenberger notes, "whenever a canonized literary work--be it a drama, novel, or verse narrative--has been turned into an opera, its admirers note and often deplore what has been 'lost' from the original in the course of transformation" (41).3 Though the action of a novel must be compressed in order to produce an adaptation of this kind, Bentley's libretto, which deftly contains the action in forty short scenes organized into a prologue, prelude, two acts, and an epilogue, is actually fairly faithful to the source text. Ruders and Bentley's work preserves the "frighteningly prophetic" spirit and the "real and human story" of the novel, which is essential to the opera's success, for as Ruders remarks in an interview, "without a great story-line opera, at least modern opera, is useless" (Sequenza 21). Ruders and Bentley's adaptation, however, does deviate from the original in one important way. Only after we finish Atwood's novel and read the epilogue do we learn that Offred's story is a reconstruction from the fragments of a lost personal history that exists within a historical narrative that, like all historical narratives, is itself a reconstruction from fragments. In the opera, on the other hand, the story begins with Professor Pieixoto and the symposium at which he is speaking and at which opera-goers are default attendees. It then moves to the Red Centre, where opera-goers and handmaids alike are indoctrinated, before acts 1 and 2 begin, and opera-goers simultaneously become voyeurs, "Eyes; (4) and critics, without relinquishing their former roles as conference participants and ersatz handmaids. I have focused on opera-goers here because the audience's fragmentation into these various and disparate roles mirrors the ways in which the opera, its main character, Offred, and her narrative are literally and figuratively fragmented, even as it also underscores the way in which in an operatic adaptation of a novel, the libretto itself fragments the novel. Focusing on opera-goers, moreover, demonstrates the most significant alteration that occurs when the story moves from the page to the stage, namely, that readers become viewers and therefore become implicated in the story, rather than passive critics of it.