ARTS Opinions differ over which of John Adams’s three full-length operas is the best – but the most problematic is surely The Death of Klinghoffer, which is about the terrorist murder of a disabled Jewish-American on a hijacked Italian cruise ship in 1985. That is why Penny Woolcock’s 2003 film version of the opera created such a stir. Its intense realism forced people to ponder an unspeakable act of violence and how it could come about.
The film represented Woolcock’s first professional contact with opera. Now the 58-year-old director, who is perhaps best known for her hard-edged dramas for UK television, has embarked on another career first – directing an opera in an opera house – and the occasion is auspicious: the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Adams’s 2005 opera Doctor Atomic, which opens this Monday and transfers to the English National Opera in February.
