Last Updated on November 2, 2025
A modern classic with unflinching humanity – I’ve seen the opera, now I need to watch the film!
4.8 out of 5.0 starsDead Man Walking, a contemporary opera composed by Jake Heggie with a libretto by Terrence McNally and first performed in 2000, is based on the 1993 memoir by Louisiana nun Sister Helen Prejean. The book was followed two years later by the Oscar-winning film adaptation starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn. The opera’s harrowing story follows the execution of murderer Joseph De Rocher, charting Sister Helen’s journey as she becomes his spiritual adviser.
The narrative moves between De Rocher’s defiant denial of his crime, the anguish of the victims’ families, and a final, fragile chance at redemption. Throughout, one dreadful act is shown to have blossomed into an unending empire of misery.
Heggie’s Enduring Power
Dead Man Walking has already entered the repertory as a modern classic, a rarity in opera, where even success often burns brightly before fading. Yet Heggie’s work endures: a drama of moral courage and emotional immediacy that continues to challenge audiences wherever it is performed. The music is accessible and often cinematic, coloured by hints of jazz and gospel, while the story convincingly humanises both the convict and the nun. It is a contemporary meditation on guilt and grace, refracted through the stark realities of modern America’s death chambers.
A Visceral Opening
The opera opens on a deserted Louisiana road at night, where two teenagers, making out in a car, are ambushed and murdered by Joseph De Rocher (Michael Mayes) and his brother. The prologue is wordless; instead, the ENO orchestra unleashes a brutally dynamic prelude of jagged brass and dissonant strings, building unbearable tension. Under Kerem Hasan’s baton, it is a brilliant and visceral opening that promises much.
Prayer and Humanity in Dead Man Walking
The drama shifts from horror to prayer as Christine Rice’s Sister Helen begins an unaccompanied hymn, He Will Gather Us Around. Although newly composed by Heggie, it sounds as though it might have floated from any Southern chapel on a Sunday morning: plainspoken, rooted, and luminous with faith. It becomes Helen’s spiritual compass, a motif to which the opera returns whenever mercy feels most remote. Rice sings it with warmth that belies her slight frame, a mezzo of burnished colour and unforced sincerity. Those first, unaccompanied phrases sent a genuine shiver through the house, a moment of quiet revelation before the storm.
Joined on stage by children, parents and nuns, Sister Helen reads a letter from De Rocher asking for her help, while the children sing brightly. The Finchley Children’s Music Group were polished and professional, their immaculate tone matched by charmingly natural acting. Alongside them, Sister Rose, sung by Harwood Artist Madeline Boreham, offered a radiant warmth that balanced beautifully against Rice’s vulnerability.
The Prison Encounter
In the prison, Sister Helen meets De Rocher for the first time, a pivotal encounter that defines their uneasy bond. Brilliantly cast, Michael Mayes towered over Christine Rice, yet managed to project a disarming vulnerability beneath the swagger. Vocally, they made an ideal pairing, with Mayes’s rich, muscular baritone blending seamlessly with Rice’s warmth and humanity.
The parents of the murdered children, Owen and Kitty Hart (Jacques Imbrailo and Gweneth Ann Rand) and Jade and Howard Boucher (Catherine Carby and Hubert Francis), formed a powerful quartet, embodying grief, fury and moral exhaustion. Imbrailo’s anguished outburst questioning Sister Helen’s purpose and compassion was among the evening’s most moving moments, an unexpected highlight.
Love, Loss and Forgiveness
Dame Sarah Connolly was heart-wrenching as Mrs De Rocher, delivering God’s Love and Forgiveness, a prayer-like aria in which she begs Helen to help save her son’s life. It is one of Heggie’s finest moments, its simple lyricism carrying a devastating emotional weight. But nothing can be done.
As the opera moves towards its close, Heggie pares everything back to essentials. Kerem Hasan shapes the final scenes with taut, almost cinematic control, letting silence and stillness speak louder than any orchestral thunder. De Rocher’s execution is played without sentimentality, the music drained to a bare thread of sound as Sister Helen’s prayer circles back to He Will Gather Us Around. It lands with quiet inevitability. What could so easily have tipped into melodrama feels instead like hard-won truth: the moment when guilt, forgiveness and love finally coexist in uneasy peace. By the curtain, the ENO audience sat in stunned silence, proof, if any were needed, that Dead Man Walking still has the power to hit like a moral earthquake.
Dead Man Walking – The Verdict
It was, in the end, an evening that reaffirmed the opera’s extraordinary reach. Heggie and McNally’s story may be rooted in the specifics of the American South, but its questions about justice, mercy and what it means to forgive feel uncomfortably close to home. ENO’s staging, with brilliantly simple two-level sets from Alex Eales, charming and convincing costumes from Evie Gurney, and sensitive lighting from D. M. Wood, never preaches; it simply presents, and lets the music and humanity do the work. By the final blackout, you felt you had been through something raw, cleansing and unmistakably real.
Ultimately, Dead Man Walking is a story of love and death, of enlightenment and redemption, and of spiritual release. Heggie’s first full-length opera was a phenomenal debut that has become one of the most performed operas of the new century, with more than eighty productions worldwide. With a musical language that is tonal, direct and unapologetically emotional, Dead Man Walking marries the traditions of Bernstein and Britten with the muscular lyricism of contemporary American theatre.
Jake Heggie himself has since emerged as one of the central figures in modern American opera, with several subsequent works to his name. Yet Dead Man Walking remains his defining statement: a work that invites audiences not to take sides, but to feel deeply, uncomfortably and perhaps redemptively.
Dead Man Walking continues Annilese Miskimmon’s project of reasserting opera’s contemporary relevance through emotionally direct storytelling. It is the first fully staged professional UK presentation of Heggie’s opera. It opened on 1 November 2025 and runs for six performances through to 18 November 2025, in a co-production with Opera North and the Finnish National Opera.
Performances are on 4, 8, 12, 15 and 18 November. The opera is sung in English, with surtitles above the stage. Tickets start from £15, with ENO’s ongoing commitment to accessibility offering free tickets for under-21s and generous discounts for those aged 21 to 35.
The production carries an age guidance of 18+ and contains scenes depicting sexual assault, murder, execution and religious struggle.
For further information, visit www.eno.org.
English National Opera
London Coliseum
St Martin’s Lane
London
WC2N 4ES
All photos copyright Manuel Harlan for English National Opera
Looking for something different? There’s just one last chance to see Turnage’s The Railway Children at the Southbank Centre on 8th November
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