George Benjamin and Martin Crimp’s Written on Skin makes its national debut at the Royal Danish Opera on 14 September. Katie Mitchell’s celebrated world premiere production will be in rep until 4 October, receiving six performances conducted by Evan Rogister. Daniel Okulitch sings the role of the Protector, with Morten Grove Frandsen as the Boy and soprano Gisela Still as Agnès.
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. A new production of Written on Skin – the work’s eleventh original staging to date – directed by Tatjana Gürbac will open at the Oper Frankfurt in March 2026.
Mitchell’s production, with designs by Vicki Mortimer, has appeared at the Aix-en-Provence Festival (where the work premiered in 2012), the Opéra Comique, Dutch National Opera, London’s Royal Opera, and, in 2024 and 2025, at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, to acclaim. In 2018 Mitchell created the world premiere staging of Benjamin’s third collaboration with Crimp Lessons in Love and Violence for the Royal Opera.
In July 2025 Picture a day like this, Benjamin and Crimp’s fourth stage work, made its Austrian debut at the Tiroler Festspiele, in the world premiere production directed by Daniel Jeanneteau and Marie-Christine Soma, and conducted by Corinna Niemayer, who led the UK premiere of the work in 2023 as well as its Luxembourg debut in February 2025. She returns to the bittersweet, 60-minute exploration of loss and happiness in October 2025 at the Teatro di San Carlo, where the opera receives its Italian premiere. Its German premiere at Oper Köln follows in May 2026, with Christian Karlsen conducting.