Dear Marie Stopes - opera — Alex Mills

Dear Maries Stopes

“A first rate addition to the catalogue of one-act operas” - The Stage

Dear Marie Stopes is an opera of forbidden voices, drawn from real correspondence sent to birth control pioneer Marie Stopes in response to her groundbreaking 1918 sex manual Married Love. It forms a chorus of private letters — on sex, shame, desire, and bodily autonomy — written over a century ago, yet uncannily resonant today. The opera premiered at the Wellcome Collection in 2018 and in Kings Place in 2019.

Dear Marie Stopes is a chamber opera that gives voice to a century-old archive of intimate, anonymous letters about sex, desire, and reproductive autonomy — revealing how urgently these conversations still resonate today.

Drawing on correspondence sent to Marie Stopes following the publication of her groundbreaking 1918 sex manual Married Love, the work transforms private testimony into a collective, musical act of witnessing.

The opera emerged from research into the extensive archive held at the Wellcome Collection, containing thousands of letters written by members of the public in response to Stopes’ writing on sex, birth control, and relationships. These letters — by turns candid, distressed, hopeful, and confrontational — offer a rare and unfiltered insight into the lived realities of sexuality in the early twentieth century. While much has changed, many of the attitudes and struggles they express remain strikingly familiar, collapsing the distance between past and present.

Dear Maries Stopes trailer:

Jess Dandy, contralto - 'Dear Marie Stopes' at King's Place (2019)

Alexa Mason, soprano - 'Dear Marie Stopes' at King's Place (2019)

Feargal Mostyn-Williams, countertenor - 'Dear Marie Stopes' at King's Place (2019)

Dear Marie Stopes at King's Place (2019)

Image: the original production of ‘Dear Marie Stopes’ at the Wellcome Collection, 2018, directed by Nina Brazier. Pictured: Liam Byrne (viola da gamba), Jess Dandy (contralto), Feargal Mostyn-Williams (countertenor), Alexa Mason (soprano). Image by Claire Shovelton.

The libretto, created with librettist Jennifer Thorp and informed by the research of Lesley Hall, is constructed from fragments of these letters, forming a mosaic of voices rather than a linear narrative. Marie Stopes herself appears intermittently — not as a central protagonist, but as a conduit through which these voices are heard, revealing both her advocacy for sexual equality and the more troubling aspects of her legacy.

Scored for three singers, viola da gamba, cello and percussion, the music creates a restrained, intimate soundworld that allows the text to remain at the forefront.

Plainchant-like vocal lines, drones, and slowly shifting harmonies provide space for the emotional weight of the material to unfold.

The three singers inhabit multiple perspectives, moving fluidly between different identities and experiences, while the instrumental writing — developed in close collaboration with Liam Byrne and cellist Lucy Railton — supports and extends the vocal texture.

Lasting approximately 40 minutes, the opera unfolds as a sequence of impressions and encounters, inviting the audience to reflect on how histories of intimacy, power, and control continue to shape our present.