The Testament of Ann Lee with Daniel Blumberg and Amanda Seyfried review – yelps, bells and bruised beauty

Live on stage the Oscar-winning composer’s score is disorientating, ecstatic and strange. Its star, Amanda Seyfried’s pure voice is the anchor in a brief but absorbing set

A few days ago, Amanda Seyfried was on the Graham Norton couch alongside Margot Robbie and Johannes Radebe from Strictly. Tonight, the star of Mean Girls, Les Misérables and Mamma Mia is seated among a rather different set of luminaries: key figures from London’s avant garde jazz scene.

The link here is composer Daniel Blumberg. When he accepted an Oscar last year for his extraordinary score to The Brutalist, Blumberg namechecked Cafe Oto, the leftfield Dalston venue whose improvising musicians have long formed the bedrock of his work. While scoring The Testament of Ann Lee – a biopic starring Seyfried as the founder of the Shaker religious movement – Blumberg was struck by parallels between Shaker worship and free improvisation: a shared ascetic intensity, a cult-like devotion, and moments of wild, euphoric release. The speaking-in-tongues qualities of Shaker devotional singing, he realised, had uncanny echoes in the work of vocal improvisers such as Phil Minton and Maggie Nicols, both of whom feature in the film – and in this performance.

Seyfried, a fine musician (as anyone who caught her playing dulcimer on Jimmy Fallon’s show will know), sings the Shaker-style hymns that Blumberg wrote for the film. Her voice – pure, hymnal, lightly inflected with Appalachian bends – acts as a melodic anchor while the rest of Blumberg’s eight-piece ensemble mutilate these songs. Violinist Billy Steiger and bassist Tom Wheatley (on what appears to be a six-string bass viol) smear the tunes with woozy drones; drummer Steve Noble teases out abrasive textures from a kettledrum; all the players clang discordant handbells, as if summoning the dead.

If the hymns in the film function as joyous, communal, Wicker Man chants, binding a congregation together, here they acquire a feral, unsettling edge. Much of that is down to Minton and Nicols. Minton – a youthful-looking 85 – unleashes his formidable arsenal of vocal effects: gasps, retches, howls, panting, animalistic whinnies. Nicols punctures the hymns with yelps, shrieks and sudden eruptions of joy. They mirror, and then grotesquely exaggerate, the Shakers’ ecstatic glossolalia.

What emerges is not accompaniment but confrontation: faith rubbed raw by improvisation, beauty deliberately bruised. Seyfried holds her ground throughout, unflinching amid the sonic sabotage, less Hollywood interloper than fully embedded participant. The result – although only 45 minutes long in total – is exhilarating and wonderfully disorientating.