Composer/librettist: Isabella Gellis
Director/designer: Jack Furness
Musical Director: Finnegan Downie Dear
We are all used to operas with unlikely stories, but most of us will never have encountered one as extraordinary as The Devil’s Den, described as “a folkloric opera”. It is based upon a legend surrounding a dolmen in Wiltshire where every night the Devil is supposed to come to attempt to dislodge the horizontal stone, encouraged by a giant rabbit. The myth has it that, if a good girl runs round the dolmen seven times a night, all will be well, but, if a bad girl attempts it, she will summon up a fire-breathing toad.
Isabella Gellis takes the story of a girl who to protect her mother’s unborn child races gleefully around the dolmen until she encounters the Devil and the rabbit, but later (unseen by the audience) gives her mother white hellebore instead of ramsons. The unborn child is lost; so, too, the older one, taken off by the Devil.
The remarkable thing is that this holds the attention, the working out of events (spurred on by the Druid who initially advised the mother) is gripping and dramatic, aided by the frequent interpolations of the increasingly menacing Sheffield City Morris. The sense of something pagan about Morris dancing has never been stronger than when they appear in grotesque garb as a charivari, mocking the wrong-doer.
Gellis’ libretto is sparse, full of repetition and strange noises, with some very neat wit in the opening scene where the Druid is clearly holding a clinic for the townsfolk. Ossian Huskinson’s glorious low note at the very beginning proves to be his start to an answer to a question about St. Agnes’ Eve and the whole scene is deceptively comic, with the questions framed for different instruments. The mother, incidentally, never appears, being represented by a trumpet.
The music is from time to time spine-tingling, periodically melodic and mostly exercising the fifteen musicians in the orchestra (generally one per instrument) in finding uncanny noises to heighten the sense of the supernatural. The orchestra sat behind the action and appeared to be generally young, all the more reason to be delighted with Finnegan Downie Dear’s success in attaining such commitment.
Lotte Betts-Dean (the Devil) and Nicholas Morris (the rabbit and the toad) too, go beyond the norm in their bizarre and menacing screams and calls, while Huskinson and, especially, Jennifer France (the child) offer more conventionally human portraits, Huskinson bringing in the audience in tones that are more familiar in a Hellfire preacher, while France is the centre of our sympathy, whether happily singing or listening crushed to the words of the druid.
Jack Furness takes up the entire Front Stalls area of the Howard for the orchestra and a massive (though not particularly solid) dolmen and uses a broodingly informative screen to inform us of dialogue and much else.
The Devil’s Den, Shadwell Opera’s first commission, was first staged at Nevill Holt Opera last year in what appears to have been a totally different production. Now that Opera North is co-operating with Shadwell Opera on this production, one trusts that more areas will have the chance to savour its splendid excesses!
Reviewed on 15th November 2025
