Sky in a Small Cage review – beauty and bafflement in opera inspired by Sufi mystic Rumi

Barbican, London
Rolf Hind’s opera about the 13th-century poet is mostly hard to follow, but countertenor James Hall and baritone Yannis François come into their own when the drama is clearer

The life and writings of the 13th-century Sufi mystic and poet Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi, better known as Rumi, provide the inspiration for Rolf Hind’s opera. First seen in Copenhagen last month, Sky in a Small Cage was brought to the Barbican in the same Mahogany Opera production, directed by Frederic Wake-Walker.

The relationship between the poet, who was born in 1207 in what is now Anatolian Turkey, and the dervish Shams-e Tabrizi, with whom he is said to have spent 40 days that changed the course of his life, provides the 90-minute opera with its emotional core, and, it turns out, with its most powerful, most conventionally operatic moments. Around that event Dante Micheaux’s libretto, which incorporates Rumi’s own poetry, presents the story of his life in a series of disconnected episodes, which are mostly conveyed through a narrator, Elaine Mitchener, whose delivery ranges between speech, declamation and, at one point, a fully fledged operatic scena including a loud hailer.

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