Bolted

Reviews

Bolted

Andrew Clark, Financial Times

Bolted dramatises a love-triangle – a girl (soprano Angela Hardie) so besotted by her horse that her boyfriend (countertenor Daniel Keating-Roberts) feels threatened, even after the horse has bolted.

Murphy’s score, an intoxicating mix of folk, madrigal, Britten-esque arioso and pop-rhapsody, veers between lyrical soliloquising and expressive intensity – seamlessly connected and wonderfully atmospheric, even when accompanied by a winter morning’s freezing temperatures.

The secret of Bolted is its power of suggestion. It doesn’t need a fancy set or a big cast to stoke our imagination. It doesn’t even need the stables. Like all the most expressive performances, it creates its own reality, and this one lingered long after the fading of the soprano’s ecstatic repetitions of “My horse” and the silencing of the cellist’s clip-clop rhythms.