I’m peering into a vast hangar teeming with tech crew wearing hi-vis and hard hats. Enormous lighting rigs hang low to the ground. Somewhere out of sight is the biggest lift in Europe, allowing articulated lorries to drive straight in. This is the Warehouse in Manchester’s Aviva Studios. Since opening in 2023, this arts venue run by Factory International has presented gigs by major pop acts, the largest ever show by cult Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama and a “sprawling four-hour odyssey through often naked rituals” by performance artist Marina Abramović. Now, for the first time, it’s hosting opera.
More precisely, it’s about to host English National Opera’s first production created in and for Manchester: the UK premiere of Angel’s Bone by Chinese-American composer Du Yun and Canadian librettist Royce Vavrek, staged by acclaimed Australian director Kip Williams. The opera won the 2017 Pulitzer prize, commended as a “harrowing allegory for human trafficking in the modern world” following its 2016 world premiere in the US.
“I nearly fell off my chair the first time I listened to it,” Williams recalls backstage. “I was astonished and thrilled that ENO was keen to programme it. It starts with this Gregorian chant and soon enters into what sounds like a track from [Radiohead album] Kid A, and then you’re in a piece that sounds like you’re in Cabaret, and then you’re in a Björk aria. It’s this incredible, kaleidoscopic mashup of different genres.”
Angel’s Bone marks Williams’s operatic debut in the UK, after West End hits including The Picture of Dorian Gray and his current one-woman Dracula starring Cynthia Erivo. But he’s had plenty of experience staging opera in “big concrete volumes” for Sydney Chamber Opera. The Warehouse, he enthuses, is an even bigger “blank canvas”, allowing him to “approach the staging with the same sort of radical abandon” that he detects in Du Yun and Vavrek’s opera.
The plot centres on a couple – Mr and Mrs X E – who discover two battered angels in their home. Care quickly turns to exploitation. “She’s not a terribly nice character,” groans singer Allison Cook, who plays Mrs X E. “She’s a sex trafficker and – if we believe that the angels are underage – she’s also a paedophile. And she’s driven, driven, driven by money and desperation and wanting to get out of a really ordinary life.”
Speaking from her home in New York, Du Yun tells me that she and Vavrek initially conceived the piece from the angels’ perspective. But after working with survivors of human trafficking, they decided to switch to focusing on “the middle people” and the issue of accountability – “the question becoming: if no one is looking and if I could be given a situation of exploiting others, what would I do?”
Throughout the creative process and since, Du Yun confesses, she has asked herself: “What’s the point of writing a piece like this? What are you really trying to solve?” As she explains: “Because opera is so expensive, there’s all these morality questions. But the piece has gone to Hong Kong and Germany and Vancouver, and each time it makes me really happy to see that organisations or opera companies try to really address the issues in their part of the world.”
Williams understands the plot in a larger context. “It’s a piece that examines the apex moral crisis of our current cultural-economic paradigm,” he says. “One that allows us to perform an idea of who we are – and in particular, who we are morally and publicly – while concealing the truth of our actions.” He has also been researching trafficking itself. “It’s the number two criminal industry in the world” (after the illegal drugs trade), he says. “The phrase I kept coming across in my research was that you can sell a bag of drugs once; but you can sell a human being five to 10 times a day. Which is a horribly graphic, brutal summation of why this industry is so prolific.”
Williams is adamant that the “innate abstraction of music” makes opera particularly well suited to such complex subject matter. He doesn’t want to give too much away, but explains that his production will stage Angel’s Bone in the round, with a “strong architectural element” and an “expansive and new video element”. It says something about the genuine buzz around Williams’s work with ENO that every person I speak to provides production spoilers galore as they enthuse about what’s to come.
But it won’t only be the performance and production that are scrutinised when Angel’s Bone opens on 12 May. This is also a question of ENO’s developing relationship with Manchester. “They don’t come here with Rigoletto, you know?” says conductor Baldur Brönniman approvingly when we speak between rehearsals. “The fact that ENO does something like this as a first piece in Manchester is a risk that one really has to celebrate.”
Baritone Rodney Earl Clarke (who sings Mr X E) even draws a direct parallel between the opera’s subject matter – “confrontational, brutal, it forces us to turn in on ourselves and look at what we’re doing” – and ENO’s decision to programme it at Aviva Studios. “It shows bravery and a real shift in a direction of travel,” he says, “in terms of how [ENO] views opera and how opera can be positioned in today’s world in a way that is useful and not just staid and tired.”
This should be music to the ears of Arts Council England. Remember the article penned by ACE’s chief executive Darren Henley in which he recommended the “fresh thinking” of “opera in car parks, opera in pubs, opera on your tablet”? Or ACE’s most recent opera policy pronouncement (in its response to the Opera and Music Theatre Analysis it had commissioned), that reiterates the need “to revitalise and refresh” the artform to ensure its “long-term health”? Bringing opera to a hi-tech concrete cavern in a venue with a young, diverse audience seems to tick all those boxes.
And just as well. ENO’s Aviva Studios debut follows a tumultuous period, after ACE announced in 2022 that it was ending the company’s public funding. Emergency funding was then reinstated on the condition that ENO move out of London. ENO’s music director Martyn Brabbins resigned. There was industrial action as the chorus, orchestra and music staff were threatened with redundancy and re-employment for only six months of the year (a deal was eventually struck for seven). There was a tussle over which “region” to head for, before Manchester was officially chosen. But by then ACE’s rhetoric around the company’s future had softened to allow for a “main base” outside London alongside continued work in the capital. More recently ENO’s own language has been of a “partnership” with Greater Manchester.
Aviva Studios was still under construction but featured in those negotiations as “a place that can host opera – but in quite an interesting way,” explains Rivca Burns, Factory International’s head of music, as she shows me around. Opera, Burns reckons, is “a few steps behind in terms of how they’ve engaged with new audiences. It’s really exciting to be working in collaboration with them to push those expectations.”
Collaboration seems to be the keyword. Angel’s Bone will be the product of a three-way partnership between ENO, Factory International and BBC Philharmonic. Based further down the River Irwell from Aviva Studios, in Salford’s MediaCity, the BBC Philharmonic is providing the opera’s 10-part instrumental ensemble. But what about ENO’s own orchestra? Adam Szabo, the BBC’s Philharmonic’s director since 2024, points out that they’ll be performing when ENO takes Angel’s Bone to London’s Coliseum in October, with Du Yun’s revised, full-orchestra version of the score. In the meantime, Szabo says firmly, “I don’t think anyone is advocating for a model where work is created in London then pushed outside of the capital.”
Despite concerns aired (most often by commentators in London) in the long, tense aftermath of ACE’s 2022 announcement, both Szabo and Burns are confident that there’s space in Greater Manchester for another classical music organisation. And indeed another opera company alongside Opera North, which tours regularly to the Lowry, a stone’s throw from the BBC Philharmonic’s home. Since Szabo arrived in Manchester in 2012, he tells me, “it’s been only growth, only bigger audiences, only newer venues”. What’s more, since ENO started performing in the city in 2025, the BBC Philharmonic’s average yield” from its Bridgewater Hall concerts has increased by 40%. “It’s not this zero-sum game where everyone’s fighting for the same people,” he insists.
Burns is blunter in her optimism about ENO’s future. “I think if it’s going to work anywhere, it’s going to work here,” she grins. “Manchester has such curious people. And Angel’s Bone will be a nice moment for ENO to show their experimental – and actually quite accessible – side. This isn’t the opera you think you know.”
• Angel’s Bone is at Aviva Studios, Manchester 12-16 May and at the London Coliseum 16–31 October
