On 7 November George Benjamin and Martin Crimp’s Written on Skin opened at the Bergen National Opera, conducted by Lawrence Renes. Katie Mitchell’s celebrated world premiere production is in rep for four performances until 13 November, with the work appearing alongside an opera gala celebrating 20 years of the Bergen National Opera. The performances will mark the first full staging of the work in Norway, which previously made its debut in a concert version in Stavanger in 2024, conducted by the composer.
The 95-minute opera, whose three parts are cast in one taut unbroken span, is an intense tale of jealousy, love, and brutality after an Occitan fable. It has received over 160 performances since its debut at the Aix-en-Provence festival in 2012 in ten different productions and has been acclaimed as one of the finest works of the twenty-first century by the Guardian. In Bergen the cast comprises Mark Stone as The Protector, countertenor Alexander Chance as The Boy, and Mari Eriksmoen as Agnès.
The opera has received 11 productions and over 160 performances since its 2012 debut at the Aix-en-Provence Festival; the most recent was a celebrated staging by Tatjana Gürbaca at Oper Frankfurt in April 2026, where it was praised by critics. In September 2025 the opera, in Mitchell’s production, received its Danish premiere at the Royal Danish Opera; the staging, with designs by Vicki Mortimer, has appeared at the Opéra Comique, Dutch National Opera, London’s Royal Opera, and the Deutsche Oper Berlin.
Lessons in Love and Violence, Benjamin’s third collaboration with Crimp and created in 2018 for the Royal Opera House, returns to London in a semi-staging at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall on 25 November 2026, directed by Dan Ayling and conducted by Edward Gardner, as part of Benjamin’s three-season residency with the London Philharmonic Orchestra.