Götterdämmerung/Scottish Opera, Edinburgh Festival Theatre, Edinburg<br></br>The Handmaid's Tale/ENO, Coliseum, London

Sometimes a dangerous path is the one to tread

Last weekend Scottish Opera reached the last leg before this summer's eagerly-awaited Ring Cycle with Götterdämmerung; the most lavish, slow-weaving, outrageously plotted and orchestrally transcendent of Wagner's four operas; the one in which this company's orchestra has reached an apotheosis under conductor Richard Armstrong and its singers have shown once more how ensemble work can be applied to this repertoire.

If I've been guilty of devoting too much space to Tim Albery's clean, hyper-naturalistic direction or Hildegard Bechtler's gracious, off-kilter industrial designs in previous reviews, it's because this has been the team that translated Wagner for me. But only in Götterdämmerung – which has quite the oddest balance between seemingly fast-moving plot-driven drama and long caesurae where absolutely nothing happens except the uncurling of a single thought – have I clocked how intrinsic Armstrong has been to the process of mapping the qualities of ambition, greed, purity and naivety that jostle for pre-eminence across the cycle. This is a conductor who is supremely supportive of his singers. As in the previous operas, the casting is excellent; young, vibrant, well-balanced, and including some names who will definitely become bigger. Though Graham Sanders's understudy, Matthew Elton Thomas (Siegfried) coped well with the pressure of a last-minute first-night, unsteadiness of tone suggests that he might have made the transition from baritone to heldentenor too swiftly. More assured were Jane Irwin's heartfelt Waltraute, the saucy trio of Rhinemaidens (Inka Rinn, Marianne Anderson and Leah Marian Jones), Mats Almgren's glowering Hagen and Elizabeth Byrne's riveting Brünnhilde.

In stark contrast to Götterdämmerung, the few shortcomings of which will doubtless be regarded with extreme benevolence, English National Opera's latest offering, The Handmaid's Tale, has attracted unprecedented levels of blokey scorn from most of my fellow critics. Though Phyllida Lloyd's production of Poul Ruders's opera – which opens with apocalyptic video images of an exploding Statue of Liberty – premiered in Copenhagen in 2000 and Margaret Atwood's original novel was published some 15 years before that, much has been made of its "timely" nature and, um, "man-bashing" stance; with the clear inference that The Handmaid's Tale is playing to a left-leaning gallery of ball-breaking, anti-war wimmin and their all-cooking, all-cleaning, all-wimp house-husbands. The appalling suffering of Offred (Stephanie Marshall) under the Republic of Gilead's right-wing theocracy has thus been trivialised as modish feminazi propaganda, while the humiliation of indentured stud-servant Nick (Richard Coxon), along with the quotidian executions of Gilead's male doctors, priests and academics, have received scant attention. Less attention, in fact, than Marshall's "lithe" figure.

So dystopia breeds dyspepsia? Enough already. I'll say no more about it, except to point out that what one commentator described as "an aria about menstruation" was actually an aria about the ambivalent regret/relief of failed conception, which is rather a different matter. But I do wonder what to make of an opera where the critical response has been seemingly determined by gender. Now, I'll admit to a certain predisposition to Ruders's cool, elastic rhythms, visceral atonalities, and thin, pure, spacey textures, but I doubt that this has anything to do with wearing a bra or burning it, for that matter. To me The Handmaid's Tale is a story, just as Götterdämmerung is a story, and is no more nor less believable than many other operas. Yes, Ruders's work has specific social resonances, but for the duration of its first British performance my concerns and energies were focused on Offred's narrative rather than George W Bush or Jerry Falwell. Once Mads Havemann's didactic video-projection established the dreadful history of the Republic of Gilead – to my mind the least successful aspect of this production – and the amplified hiss of the Handmaid's tape-recorded diary smoothed into Offred's sorrowful recitative of emptiness and loneliness and the softly keening, pale dissonances of Ruders's orchestration, I was, for the most part, hooked.

In purely theatrical terms, Lloyd's is one of the most thorough productions I've seen. Peter Mackintosh's bold, clear set and dizzyingly fast revolve require constant agility and get it; time and location shift through Offred's narrative, from her carefree Seattle-ish "Time Before", to the Red Centre where deviant females are trained as surrogates, to the Commander's House where she is posted to conceive. Without Offred, this opera couldn't sing, couldn't persuade, couldn't move. And Marshall's ability to communicate terror, humour, tenderness and despair through her sweet, fresh, honest voice is on a par with Angelika Kirchshlager's performance in Nicholas Maw's Sophie's Choice; a role equally open to accusations of exploitation. (Offred's five year-old daughter is torn from her arms over maybe half a dozen flashbacks.) Like Maw, Ruders is uncomfortable with vocal idioms; rarely touching an emotion as acutely in the characters' lines as in his orchestration of their silences. Unlike Maw, his private recitatives have a spare, natural, conversational sound; an artful contrast to the crazed coloratura of the Red Centre's Aunt Lydia (Helen Field) and the mechanistic ritual responaries of the Handmaids. He is also audacious; over-layering TV evangelist Serena Joy (Catherine Wyn-Rogers) singing Amazing Grace with the separate musical styles of "time before" and Offred's present – though this tour de force fell flat in the face of balance problems between live, recorded and amplified sound.

It's tempting to assume that Ruders, his librettist Paul Bentley, Lloyd, and Margaret Atwood, must have done something terribly right with The Handmaid's Tale to get everyone so very hot under the collar. But "context is all", as Offred sings, and the proper balance of that context had yet to settle on the first night. Not enough has been done yet on the musical side to ensure that this fascinating, fluid, if sometimes faulty first opera can be properly heard. Conductor Elgar Howarth needs to get the sound-mixers on his side and I bitterly regretted the absence of surtitles with a libretto as vital as this one. Is The Handmaid's Tale a mere "chick flick"? I really don't think so.

a.picard@independent.co.uk

'The Ring Cycle': Edinburgh Festival, (0131 473 2000), 11 to 30 August and touring. 'The Handmaid's Tale': Coliseum, London WC2 (020 7632 8300) to 2 May