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‘I am the ghost of you, of your century … I can see myself in your eyes.’ The character Ghost, who opens the opera, tells the audience that she is one of us. She exists in the present and acts as an intermediary between us, in the here and now, and the events that took place in an upper room in Jerusalem on the first Maundy Thursday. In a long prologue, she watches, she waits, preparing us for the events that are to follow. She sings of the brutality of our own times. ‘I watch with you the subterranean stream of our history come to the surface.’ Eventually, we come to realise that the Last Supper is to be re-enacted. Ghost summons Christ and his followers out of the past: ‘Tonight you and I invite the eleven disciples to supper – once again – over bread and wine.’
The disciples enter singly and in pairs, Peter first, with his brother Andrew, all except for Judas. Each sings of his own experiences and recalls his time with Jesus. And they dance. They wonder what they are doing there, and whether Jesus will join them. Once all are assembled, they begin to reconstruct the table for the supper, piece by piece. Judas enters with a red cloth, unnoticed by the others. Together they sing the Lord’s Prayer, to which Judas adds the final ‘Amen’. Shocked that he has returned, they tell Judas to leave. They quiz him, they accuse him of betrayal; yet it soon becomes clear that Judas is tormented by his past actions. ‘I looked upon his silver face and wept’, he sings, in a deeply melancholic aria. He poses a riddle: ‘What can go in the face of the sun, yet leave no shadow?’ The disciples search for an answer, without success. Amidst all this arguing and recrimination, Christ suddenly appears with the solution: ‘The Wind’. The tumult ceases as the chorus whispers ‘Alleluia!’
The first of three visions depicts the Crucifixion, accompanied by the singing of the text of a medieval motet. Christ then blesses the disciples. Again they ask why they are there. Christ tells them he has come to wash away the dust of centuries, to atone for millennia of hatred, violence and discrimination. He washes their feet in turn. To further calls of ‘Alleluia!’, they take their places at the table, Judas included. ‘Who is the betrayer? What has been betrayed?’ The second vision represents the Stations of the Cross. Christ offers his body and blood in the form of bread and wine, a sign of life, of love. As they walk to the Mount of Olives, the final vision depicts the Betrayal. ‘Whom do you seek?’ Christ asks. The sound of a solitary cock crow is the only answer.