Least Like the Other review: Rosemary Kennedy’s story told with provocative boldness

Not everything works in the Irish National Opera’s take on JFK’s tragic sister, but it’s a uniquely ambitious piece of stagecraft

Amy Ní Fhearraigh incarnates Rosemary with pathos and delicately inflected persuasiveness (Kip Carroll)

The subject of Least Like the Other is Rosemary Kennedy, the older sister of JFK whose existence was kept a closely guarded secret for most of her long life. At birth, she was the victim of a scandalous piece of incompetence in the operating theatre which starved her brain of oxygen and left her with lifelong learning difficulties.

She grew up to be an “affectionate, warmly responsive, and loving” girl, but her impulsive behaviour in her teens worried the nuns at the convent where she was sent to study, and it worried her father even more. Beautiful, she took to sneaking out at night and meeting boys: patriarch Joseph Kennedy dreaded what a family pregnancy scandal would do to his carefully laid political plans.

In 1941 he secretly arranged for her to have a pre-frontal lobotomy. That was an operation in which the links between the frontal lobes and the rest of the brain were physically severed, as two holes were drilled into the skull: this was a short-lived craze for curing “difficult” people, but it often went disastrously wrong.

And it did so in Rosemary’s case, leaving her with the mental age and muscle control of a two-year-old. Subjected to an also-fashionable Binet intelligence test, she was classified as a “moron”, the other classifications at the bottom of the scale being “imbecile” and “idiot”. Her parents virtually disowned her, but she lived on in an institution until she was 86.

Enter composer Brian Irvine and director Netia Jones, gripped by the story and determined to make an opera out of it. But as Jones points out, it’s a story that can only be told “in fragments and broken pieces” because all the evidence that survives is letters, film-archive glimpses of Rosemary in her youth, and heavily-redacted extracts from medical and psychological reports.

The pair decided to tell the story with a soprano in the leading role, plus two actors in multiple parts. The process of finding a way to tell the story, they say, became the work itself; “it’s a show about us making a show”. The plot would end with the fateful lobotomy.

Netia Jones is justly famed for her brilliance in melding live with projected action, and that meld is the keynote of this 70-minute show. But it’s also the foundation for a uniquely ambitious piece of stagecraft, with a live instrumental accompaniment of provocative boldness: my ears have never been assaulted so deafeningly and raucously as by Irvine’s fortissimo blast of brass in the opening scene.

There’s a dizzying amount of stuff – often too much – going on at almost every moment in this production, with archive footage plus information projected in a variety of styles, while the actors declaim the same information. One doesn’t know where to look.

Stephanie Dufresne, Ní­ Fhearraigh and Ronan Leahy in ‘Least Like the Other’ (Kip Carroll)

But we get dazzling performances from actors Stephanie Dufresne and Ronan Leahy, while soprano Amy Ní Fhearraigh incarnates Rosemary with pathos and delicately inflected persuasiveness. Meanwhile the score – delivered by the strings and brass of the Irish National Opera Orchestra – offers a protean display of compositional virtuosity.

But there are problems in this production, the result, I suspect, of nobody having been on hand to point out – kindly but firmly – that some scenes don’t work. There are times when the information overload is so great that it obliterates the story it purports to be telling. And there’s a lot of detailed history in this work, as Rosemary’s enforced and humiliating pilgrimage from agency to agency becomes reflected in their reports.

It’s significant that this work should have originated in Ireland, where patriarchal misogyny – sanctioned by the Roman Catholic Church – is worse than anywhere else in the British Isles. And if you look at America, where many states are now seeking to outlaw abortion, you realise that the forces which destroyed Rosemary are anything but spent. This work may speak of events long past, but it has deep significance for today.

Until January 19, Royal Opera House