Ecstasy of the Virtues – Howard Assembly Room, Leeds

Composer/Librettist/Director: Nwando Ebizie

This is probably the strangest theatrical/operatic event your reviewer has witnessed: genre-defying, immersive, often more ritual than opera, it is described as “a mystery opera”, but that is mystery as in mystery plays. Nwando Ebizie’s libretto is based on the medieval mystery play, Ordo Virtutum, by the mystic, writer and composer Hildegard of Bingen. The work has been a long time in bringing to a successful conclusion as Ebizie and her collective of performers and support team have been working on it since her 2018 residency with Opera North.

Now it has been brought to fruition with Mahogany Opera, a 90-minute re-working of Hildegard’s original by an international cast of a dozen women, from different performative backgrounds. As we enter the Howard Assembly Room, six white-clad singers are already performing a mesmeric chant, accompanied by stately dance moves. These are The Oracle, pretty much the main constant as the story unfolds. This has similarities to the English morality play Everyman, but overlaid with Hildegard/Ebizie’s visions. The Soul goes on a journey, inspired by the Virtues and tormented by Self-Loathing, until the final triumphant ecstasy.

Ebizie’s music is more or less continuous, an electronic score sourced from the music of many different countries and periods, with a harp played live by one of the Virtues, Cevanne Horrocks-Hopayian. As the Soul embraces the Virtues and moves towards the final ecstasy, the music powerfully evokes the chants of Hildegard’s own time, but the final triumph is more suggestive, in music and actions, of a 21st century rave.

Much of the performance is decidedly more stately, enacted before a frieze that recalls Christ and His apostles, with the Virtues appearing on a balcony above, the whole thing imaginatively lit by Ryan Watson and choreographed by Krystal S. Lowe. Apart from a dominant bath, crucial to the final triumph of the Soul, there is little furniture, simply boxes on which characters can sit elegantly.

The Virtues, striking figures in different shades of puff-ball costumes, each portray so many virtues that one fails in identifying them, but Laura Bowler, Grace Nyandoro, Yfat Soul Zisso and Horrocks-Hopayian all bring distinctive vocal styles to the piece. Sara Amini is the quietly receptive Soul, but the most remarkable performance comes from Chisato Minamimura as Self-Loathing, a deaf Japanese artist whose expressive face and movements merge sign language, mime and dance.

The interval sees the cast receiving offerings from a few audience members, mixing with the audience, offering sweets and leading individuals by the hand to the stage area. One felt that the configuration of the Howard Assembly Room wasn’t really helpful in creating an immersive performance.

The sincerity of the cast stands out as clearly as their talents from a wide range of backgrounds, even the occasional opera singer, but this reviewer emerged impressed and confused in equal measure.

Reviewed on 3rd October 2026

Ecstasy of the Virtues has a further performance at Barrow Town Hall on 7th October 2026.