Caritas: The Opera

Readers of the previous chapter will have gleaned some basic information about the way in which Arnold Wesker’s stage play was adapted for musical setting – and, it is hoped, will be aware of most (if not all) of the dramatic incidents that contribute to the ‘plot’ of Caritas, the opera. As Tables 3.1 and 3.2 make clear, the action is spread over a period of some four or more years ¹ with 17 June 1381 providing a focal point for both strands of the interlinked narratives of Christine Carpenter’s life as an anchoress and England’s social unrest as embodied in the Peasants’ Uprising. Clearly, it is a common characteristic of historical dramas that the unities of time and place are rarely observed in production – although the approximate proportions of historical time may be reflected in real time (that is the duration of the corresponding sections of dramatic action). At first sight, the obvious imbalance between the lengths of the two acts of the opera might appear to suggest that this has not been achieved in Caritas, but it is important to recall the Composer’s Note ² in which Saxton effectively describes Act 2 as a final scene without a separating interval – shortened ‘in order to create an uninterrupted drama’. In fact, this concluding scene (scene 13), when combined with the preceding scenes (scenes 10–12) that also take place notionally in 1381, results in a total duration that counterbalances the first seven scenes of Act 1 ³ (those that take place in 1377–78) as Table 4.1 demonstrates. Furthermore, the two remaining scenes (scenes 8 and 9), which take place in 1379–80, can be identified as central turning points in the conjoined dramas, with scene 8 (dated February 1379) ⁴ containing debates in the Carpenter household about yet more taxes, the state of the country, issues of literacy and their observations on Christine’s declining self-esteem 48– whereas, by contrast, scene 9 (undated) concentrates on Christine herself, as she oscillates between devotion, imagined visions and a growing awareness of the hopelessness of her situation within the narrow confines of her (now filthy) cell.