Walshe - MARS (Dublin, 2025)

Jennifer Walshe - MARS

Irish National Opera, 2025

Elaine Kelly, Tom Creed, Jennifer Walshe, Nina Guo, Jade Phoenix, Sarah Richmond, Doreen Curran

Abbey Theatre, Dublin - 7th August 2025

It's high time that we had a full-length opera from Jennifer Walshe, internationally recognised as one of Ireland's most original contemporary musicians and performers. Working primarily with the voice, it had to be a natural progression and there were signs of her heading in that direction with her short work Libris Solar (2020) for Irish National Opera's 20 Shots of Opera and Ireland: A Dataset (2020), both presented during the COVID lockdown. Describing the latter piece as a 'radiophonic play', it was however a total musical-theatrical experience, albeit one unable to be performed before a live audience; an opera in all but name. It may not have been conventional but nothing Walshe does is conventional. MARS, her new work for Irish National Opera, employs many of the same techniques used in Ireland: A Dataset, taking a theme, exploring it from a number of angles rather than as a linear plot, and of course providing the usual injection of humour and not taking things too seriously.

Finding her voice, so to speak, at a time when there are serious wider contemporary issues to consider, the composer has worked with writer Mark O'Connell to develop a libretto for an opera on a more global scale, or perhaps one even more expansive that that. MARS takes us beyond the confines of the planet with a crew of four women astronauts in order to get away from consider the petty problems of the world from a distance, only to find that we bring our petty problems with us. And not just the 'petty problems' but the big ones that we can see troubling us in the present day. If you think there is danger in the power being placed in the hands of a small group of wealthy individuals with authoritarian leanings and their own space programmes, imagine what will happen when other planets come within reaching distance...

As far as it concerns the four women on the Buckminster on a nine month journey to Mars, the future is under new ownership, and that includes ownership of the crew just as they are about to touch down to explore the planet for underground water supplies to support the colony that has already been established on the planet. The company or international consortium that was financing the mission have been taken over by a corporation owned by 'tech bro' Axel Parchment, who has some 'innovative' ideas for developing and expanding the colony. Sally, Valentina, Judith and Svetlana have revised orders and a new mission; Mars needs women. But, in-between sending AI assisted messages and videos back home to raise the morale and gain new recruits, the crew make an important discovery that may enable them to take control (and control over their own bodies) back again.

The situation as outlined would seem to present the opportunity for some thoughtful contemplation on the essence of humanity, on the need to explore, stretch the boundaries of what we consider to be the human experience to incorporate new developments in technology and society; and to consider what to do when things go wrong, because things always go wrong. And indeed it does in MARS and Walshe does take a realistic response to those questions, but perhaps not initially in the way you might expect; like how these four adventurers react to the critical error that occurs when the USB drive containing the complete Criterion Collection set of movies is left behind and they have is Shrek 3 and Seasons 3 to 6 of The Housewives of Beverley Hills to get them through the isolation. It can't get much worse than that surely?

It would be a mistake to take it all too seriously, but it's more than just a joke. All too much of what happens here is recognisable in the almost unrecognisable world we are waking up to every morning, with developments in technology and AI advancing rapidly every day, distorting our familiar sense of reality, with wealthy individuals accruing more money, power and influence and exerting that control through populist appeal and dubious libertarian ideologies. Others might take a more conventional path through the challenges that face an all-woman space crew on a future expedition to Mars given this current direction of travel, but this is Jennifer Walshe and she takes the Jennifer Walshe way. Which is to say that the work is made up of a series of sketches and routines, playful in nature but with a little edge of satire.

There are some spoken work dialogues, some funny episodes, but mainly a lot of playing around with the opportunities suggested by the out of familiar world setting. Aside from the template established in Ireland: A Dataset, some sequences reminded me of Glass and Wilson's Einstein on the Beach, just simply revelling in the purity of the musical-theatrical situation with no concern of 'advancing the plot', emulating floating in zero gravity, running through wordless vocalisations and blending them with electronic sounds that also bring to mind Stockhausen's Licht, with a lament on a planetary exploration that seems to echo Ligeti's Atmosphères from 2001: A Space Odyssey. All of this is of course filtered through Walshe's sense of anarchic humour, with a few mordant swipes at popular culture and populist politics.

What is abundantly evident, even in the least serious of moments, is that Walshe has explored everything related to Mars exploration and even incorporates the sounds of space in the instrumentation through the use of synthesisers, in addition to more conventional instruments making unconventional sounds. Co-directed between Tom Creed and Walshe herself, the stage production - all credit to the incredible team that pulled this together - does exactly the same and it is genuinely groundbreaking in how the medium is also the message. Walshe has taken advantage of AI before and used it in Ireland: A Dataset, but the way the music, the sounds, the use of videos, live hand-held cameras, live distortion of voices are not just used for satire and parody, but to emphasise how much technology can be used and messages distorted. There is a lot going on and some of it just flashes by, but it all works alongside the plot and the content, an integral and equal part of the conception of the piece.

Which not to say that the human element of the work is relegated by the use of technology, otherwise that would negate the point of the work. Nina Guo, Jade Phoenix, Sarah Richmond and Doreen Curran are just superb, totally engaging in all-round performances that require acting, timing, collaboration and, despite necessarily being microphoned for mixing with the orchestra - all are experienced and brilliant opera singers that have their range fully put to the test. Those moments are used well and to terrific effect. Following its opening at Galway International Arts Festival in July and three sell-out performances at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, don't let anyone say there isn't an appetite for challenging contemporary opera and thankfully the INO seasons are always tremendously rich and varied, including contemporary Irish works, baroque opera, popular favourites and the odd rarity.

I'll be honest and say that despite the considerable efforts that have gone into the composition and marrying it to an inventive integrated production design, MARS is very entertaining and very much of the moment, but it doesn't feel like a substantial piece. Personally, I would have preferred if Walshe had just fully indulged the scenes in her random episodic fashion and left any conclusions to be drawn without the need (by writer Mark O'Connell?) to provide a conventional plot resolution, but maybe that's just me. MARS unquestionably has many other angles that are wholly Jennifer Walshe and couldn't be anyone else, and we can't ask for more than that. And perhaps there is more to the work than I'm giving her credit for; the world is indeed becoming increasingly absurd, heading into an unknown that is genuinely frightening, and MARS offers some hope that we can navigate our way through it.

External links: Irish National Opera, Jennifer Walshe on MARS in the Guardian

Dennehy - The Hunger (Dublin, 2019)

Donnacha Dennehy - The Hunger

The Abbey Theatre, 2019

Alan Pierson, The Crash Ensemble, Tom Creed, Katherine Manley, Iarla Ó Lionáird

The Abbey Theatre, Dublin - 23 August 2019

The subject of the Great Irish Famine of 1845-52 is a very big subject for any Irish artist, one that touches deep on the most fundamental emotional, social and political levels. For an Irish composer whose roots lie within the idiom of Irish traditional music there's something here then that must be delved into. Irish traditional music is the language of the common people and has its roots in the culture and the community, speaking of suffering, adversity and oppression. It's essentially this that Donnacha Dennehy approaches head-on in The Hunger.

Whether it's opera or a song cycle or something else, like all of Dennehy's forays into the lyric theatre (The Last Hotel, The Second Violinist), The Hunger doesn't fit into any easy categorisation. The work draws on writings by an American 19th century reformer Asenath Nicholson, who witnessed some of the worst privations in Ireland during the height of the potato famine. Dennehy weaves these observations and impressions into songs that feature his familiar Steve Reich-like repetitive percussive rhythms built this time even more evidently around Irish traditional melodies and laments. Video clips of interviews with academics on the subject of the Irish Famine are used to present the subject in the wider context of economic market theory and contemporary society.

What isn't there to speak of in The Hunger, or at least not in any traditional operatic sense, is dramatic action. The main figure is Asenath Nicholson, the narrator, who is witness to a number of horrific scenes. She sees a man digging in the ground, not for potatoes but to bury his daughter. He sings a piece based on a keening lament and an old-style (sean-nós) song, 'Na Prátaí Dubha' (The Black Potatoes). Her sense of helplessness, uncertainty about how to help in the face of such abject poverty and suffering is in contrast to the video interview commentary that describes how the English accepted this as a necessary consequence of a market economy and how they felt or admitted to little in the way of guilt for importing product from Ireland at the same time that people were dying of starvation there.

It doesn't take much imagination to see the relevance of The Hunger to what we see today in a world where similar attitudes exist, where inequalities are greater still, where people are dying in the sea to escape poverty and starvation while others fly around in luxury jets and book holidays in space; where people are using food banks while politicians and bankers work the market in their own personal favour. It's undoubtedly why the piece is called The Hunger, not The Famine. It's about expressing the underlying reality of one of the most inhumane forms of inaction in letting people die of hunger, and worse, in some cases there's a conscious acceptance that it's a necessary consequence of living in the modern world. It's probably for the same reason that Steve McQueen's film about the 1981 Hunger Strikes is also called Hunger, a film about Ireland again and what some would see as a similar confrontation with English indifference, the idea of someone dying of hunger recognised as an act of ultimate desperation the world over.

Evidently then the subject of The Hunger is potentially miserable and there's no point pretending that there's anything uplifting here, but there is something stoical in the perspective of the man whose laments are observed in contrast to the observations of a witness and academics. Conducted by Alan Pierson, the Crash Ensemble's playing holds a consistent musical narrative structure with an occasional dissonance that expresses a cruelty within the social structure that gives rise to such conditions. It's in the sean-nós and keening lament that gives this a human voice, an authentic voice that comes from within, that touches on the roots of the Irish condition and can't be expressed any other way. Its weaving in and out and repetition has much the same impact as Gavin Bryers' Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet.

The use of amplification was evident, but the singing performances by Katherine Manley and Iarla Ó Lionáird come from those emotional depths. For its stage performance at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, director Tom Creed strives to find a variety of means to add other levels and dimensions as an alternative to traditional dramatic action. It's not so much the accumulation of individual elements for visual interest - the video clips, the landscapes, the plot of rocky land, the mountains and cloudscapes - it's how they come together to paint a bigger picture that extends out beyond the confines of the Irish Famine to make a point about the deeper human drives that cause hunger and that hunger causes.

Dennehy's music works very much in the same way, adding layers, blending and mixing instruments and songs, striking notes and sounds that reflect the complex and painful situations that are described here and the human feelings behind them. For such an ambitious subject Dennehy covers all the bases, from the outside eye-witness account of Nicholson's texts, the modern perspective that puts it into historical context and highlights the contemporary relevance, but it's Dennehy's music that touches on and expresses the most vital viewpoint of what the Famine means to the Irish, something that has not been lost, but has been preserved in Irish traditional music and still has the power to speak to us today.

Links: The Abbey Theatre

Offenbach - Tales of Hoffmann (Dublin, 2018)

Jacques Offenbach - Tales of Hoffmann

Irish National Opera, 2018

Andrew Synnott, Tom Creed, Julian Hubbard, Claudia Boyle, Gemma Ní Bhriain, John Molloy, Andrew Gavin, Brendan Collins, Carolyn Holt, Fearghal Curtis, Kevin Neville, Peter O’Reilly, Cormac Lawlor, Robert McAllister

O'Reilly Theatre, Dublin - 14 September 2018

At this rate I could get to like Tales of Hoffmann. Up until fairly recently it's been an opera whose attraction and qualities have mostly eluded me. Part of the problem could be down to the work having been left unfinished, Offenbach dying before his only full opera (as opposed to his numerous operettas) was completed. Subjected to cuts, revisions and additions from sketches left behind by the composer to try to approximate what Offenbach might have had in mind, there's never been any clarity over the intended final shape of the work. But then, I've never been taken with the idea of purpose of the work or find that it has any great insights or truths to reveal.

It's a romance above all, a single troubled one taking shape across four different incarnations, but drawn from stories by the German writer ETA Hoffmann, Offenbach includes Hoffmann as the main character in the work, making a connection between the creator and his creations, the inspiration for them and the suffering an artist has to endure to bring them to life. That's all well and good, but the stories themselves are strange, fantastical and almost hallucinogenic in their obsessions, fuelled by alcohol and tainted with madness, the music likewise somewhat overblown.

There's a lot to work with here and certainly richness in the situations, but a good production should be able to draw it all together, bring some kind of coherence and try to make sense of it all. My experience of Tales of Hoffmann however - until fairly recently - has been that directors similarly tend to go overboard and add another level of complication and distraction. A stripped-down reduced-orchestration production by the English Touring Opera however demonstrated for me that there is much to enjoy in the work, and following a similar policy in their new production, the Irish National Opera have confirmed that impression.

Of course what is true of the approach taken towards Tales of Hoffmann is true of any opera; it can be seen at its best when music, direction and singing all come together in a cohesive production with a strong central theme. The central theme of the varied three related love stories that attest to Hoffmann's unfortunate choice in women is of course his singular love for Stella in all her varied moods and character (and an opera singer to boot!). Offenbach of course makes the connections by having not just Stella in the roles of Olympia, Antonia and Giulietta, but he keeps a thread of adversity in the combined villains of Lindorf's Coppélius, Dr. Miracle, and Dappertutto.

Created as a INO touring production and having to work within the limitations of the O'Reilly Theatre in Dublin, which is not equipped for major scene changes or special effects, director Tom Creed is somewhat limited as far as stage designs go, but in a way this helps consistency and fluency not just between the stories, but with the framing device of Hoffmann the storyteller and the connections the stories have to Stella. The lack of atmosphere in the venue also threatened to work against the efforts of the production which with only a reduced ensemble of seven players felt initially cool and detached, not really engaging with the audience. By the time Claudia Boyle's Olympia took to the stage however, that all changed.

The detached from reality aspect of the stories can still be a problem, but Tom Creed finds suitable modern updates that take some of the old-fashioned eccentricity out of the work. Rather than an automaton or living doll, Creed re-envisions Olympia for this production as a robot AI, Hoffmann dazzled by its brilliance of science but disillusioned by its lack of humanity, immune to the charm of his poetry. In the second story Hoffmann's trust in love is dashed by the inadequacy of medicine to cure Antonia if she sings. Hoffmann is charmed in the third story not by a seductive courtesan who is charged with stealing his reflection, but by a performance artist in the Venice Biennale who attempts to destroy his soul through drug addiction.

Katie Davenport's set designs cleverly provide suitable locations for Creed's updated settings that bring more of a sense of reality to the metaphor, but it still looks magical and just as importantly retains a sense of humour. The consistency and continuity is brilliantly maintained in the three major singing roles, with Claudia Boyle in particular simply outstanding. The ability to sing all the four highly challenging soprano roles is never in doubt, but there's personality and presence there as well, which makes a difference in this opera. Julian Hubbard also sang well but wasn't quite as successful in finding any deeper humanity in his character. The multiple Lindorf villain role posed no difficulties for John Molloy, an expert in this register, but he was perhaps a little too declamatory for the reduced instrumentation. Gemma Ní Bhriain's Nicklausse was exceptional and Andrew Gavin provided good support for Molloy's different incarnations. With fine performances in secondary roles and a fine chorus, the INO clearly have a strong ensemble of singers.

It was in that reduced seven-piece instrumentation, alive to the subtleties of the melodies that I feel that the Irish National Opera's production was truly successful in revealing the qualities of Offenbach's writing for Tales of Hoffmann. Andrew Synnott directing from piano is always strong with this kind of arrangement (his own composition for Dubliners at the 2017 Wexford Festival benefitted from the same treatment). As well as simply being able to appreciate the detail of the instrumentation and quality of the playing, too often lost in larger arrangements, it more than anything else helped bring consistency and cohesion to the work, while still finding plenty of room for colour and expression.

Links: Irish National Opera

Britten - Owen Wingrave (Dublin, 2017)

Benjamin Britten - Owen Wingrave

Opera Collective Ireland, 2017

Stephen Barlow, Tom Creed, Benjamin Russell, Christopher Cull, Peter O'Reilly, Roisín Walsh, Rachel Croash, Amy Ní Fherarraigh, Sarah Richmond, Andrew Boushell

O'Reilly Theatre, Dublin - 16th September 2017

Up until now Owen Wingrave has been the only Britten opera that I haven't had the opportunity to see or write about. And as good as this 2017 Opera Collective Ireland production was at the Dublin Fringe Festival - and there are certainly qualities to admire in the work - I think however I can see why it is so rarely performed. It's an opera with some very obvious flaws and certainly a lesser work by the composer.

I don't think however that anyone can question the sincerity of purpose of the opera, or Britten's fervent belief in and commitment to spreading the gospel of pacifism. Henry James's short story Owen Wingrave and the opportunity to present the work to a wider audience as a television opera might have seemed like a good vehicle to get that message across, but both seem to involve some measure of compromise with both the medium and the message.

Being written for TV presentation isn't necessarily the problem, since Britten had reservations about the new medium and strove to ensure that the opera was composed to also work as a stage drama, but there is still little of real dramatic interest in the piece. It might be a little reductive - which I think is also a fault with the opera - but essentially it seems to me to be about a young man from a family with a proud military history who says he's had enough of this war lark and doesn't want to train to be a soldier. The remainder of the opera is a series of condemnations and accusations of cowardice from his family and his fiancée's family who line up to take turns to castigate him for his decision.

There is also a ghost story element that is added to bring another dimension to the work and to show the difference between cowardice born out of fear and genuine conscientious objection to the horror of war. The supernatural element however is nowhere near as effective or of an essence to the piece as it is in Britten's other Henry James adaptation The Turn of the Screw, and it feels oddly out of place with the rather more serious intentions of the work.

Like the previous adaptation however, Britten does develop a distinctive, eerie and often challenging musical treatment for the work with greater emphasis here on percussion and use of the gamelan. Britten also makes an effort to introduce some arias and haunting 'Malo malo' moments, but the discoursive nature of the piece means that it is heavily reliant on preachy recitative. And posh preachy recitative at that, much too tied up in old family traditions and class concerns to really touch upon the essential matters at the heart of the subject.

The production design for the Opera Collective Ireland production directed by Tom Creed made some effort to update the work with references to Kandahar and the Falklands, as well as seeking to find some other ways to represent it visually, but none of them managed to enliven the work, make it any more engaging or even illustrate the at times difficult to make-out words of Myfanwy Piper's libretto. Instead of family portraits and a mansion we have a room filled with stuffed birds of prey and an isolating border wall. Projections also contribute to representational undercurrents of blind nationalism in an imposing Union Jack, and to the more sinister side of it in shadows of the hawks coming to life.

On the performance side, a good cast made the most of the roles and did their best to give them distinguishing characteristics and personality that is hard to find elsewhere in their almost unanimous condemnation of the reluctant soldier. Benjamin Russell's clear-voiced baritone was well suited to the role of Owen Wingrave and in how it blended in with Stephen Barlow's conducting of the Irish Chamber Orchestra, and Andrew Boushell's tenor soared as Sir Philip and the ballad singer. The stand-out performance however was Amy Ní Fherarraigh who cut through all the manners and mannerisms and gave us a steely, determined and frankly intimidating Mrs Julian. If only the horror of war and the supernatural elements had been depicted half as vividly as her Mrs Julian, the fate of Owen Wingrave would indeed have been something truly to fear.

Links: Opera Collective Ireland

Handel - Acis and Galatea (Dublin, 2017)

George Frideric Handel - Acis and Galatea

Opera Theatre Company, Dublin - 2017

Peter Whelan, Tom Creed, Susanna Fairbairn, Eamonn Mulhall, Edward Grint, Andrew Gavin, Peter O'Reilly, Sinéad O'Kelly, Fearghal Curtis, Cormac Lawlor

Opera Platform - 11 April 2017

It certainly comes as a bit of a surprise and does initially seem a little jarring to find the mythological content of Handel's pastoral opera Acis and Galatea located in a little provincial Irish pub. In the Opera Theatre Company's 2017 production, Handel's fable opens with the nymphs and shepherds coming in from the fields for a quick half and then changing out of their work clothes to take part in a line-dance hoedown.

It's certainly not the first image that comes to mind when you think of nymphs and shepherds in the bucolic setting of a pastoral opera, but there's ample justification for it. Checking the definition on Google, it says that a pastoral is a work that portrays an idealised version of country life, and when you put it like that and apply it to an Irish setting, the connection not only seems obvious in an equivalent modern context, but the way that the tale plays out in this setting also serves to touch on the true spirit of the piece.

This is always a key point when it comes to bringing Handel to the modern opera stage, particularly in those pieces that are more choral or oratorio in format like Acis and Galatea. It's essential not to ironically poke fun at the easy target of its idealised sentiments, but it doesn't serve the works particularly well either to play them in some kind of kitsch notion of traditional period that a modern audience will find impossible to respond to in the way that they might have 300 years ago.

On the other hand, the idea of idealisation is at the heart of Acis and Galatea, but to make it meaningful, there has to be some basis for it in reality. Tom Creed's Irish setting isn't just modernisation for the sake of being clever, it finds a way to touch more deeply on the sentiments at the heart of the work and bring that across to the audiences on the Opera Theatre Company's Irish tour. It does it so well that there's every reason to believe that it can communicate that to a wider audience in its streamed broadcast on the Opera Platform.

Adjusting expectations, bringing a clear head to lofty ideals and rushes of emotions is very much what Acis and Galatea is about, but it's also about transforming reality or creating something greater out of it. For the nymphs and shepherds, it's about celebrating the end of the day in a song and a dance (and maybe a drink or two). The semi-divine nymph Galatea (here a barmaid, much the same thing after that transformative drink or two) is troubled by the far too lofty ideals she holds in her love for the shepherd Acis, and it needs some helpful intervention from Damon to caution both of them to have a little more restraint.

The same goes for the monstrous ogre Polyphemus (here a belligerent drunk), who thinks he can gain the love of Galatea by force. Again, Damon suggests that a more gentle approach might win a fair maid ("Would you gain the tender creature"). The reaction of Acis is perhaps over-solicitous ("Love sounds th' alarm") and again he is cautioned to be more moderate in his behaviour ("Consider, fond shepherd, how fleeting's the pleasure that flatters our hopes in pursuit of the fair"). It's to no avail, as an inebriated Polyphemus staggers in and clobbers him with a brick to the head ("crushed beneath a stone") in a barroom brawl.

Acis and Galatea is not just a morality tale that warns of giving excessive licence to the sentiments, it's more about recognising them - good and bad - and being able to transform them into something more noble. In this way, humans can aspire towards the divine, and even in death Acis is transformed into a fountain. Tom Creed's handling of this vital scene is critical to the success of the production and its overall message. The flashing lights of the emergency services outside the bar, the ambulance men working on the fatally injured man in the foreground all hit home the reality of the death of Acis, while the 'fountain' supplies his friends with a drink to his memory, the commemoration of which will hopefully serve to transform the lives of others.

Music and opera is also an essential element of the transformative experience, turning stories of love and tragedy into something instructive and ennobling, and that's where Handel comes in. Musically, Acis and Galatea is one of the composer's most beautiful works, all its richness compressed into a short work that if filled with memorable melodies and songs. In the context of the performance by the Irish Baroque Orchestra conducted by Peter Whelan, some of the flute playing even delightfully evokes a sense of traditional folk music, cementing the connection between the mythology and its relocation perfectly.

Paul O'Mahony's revolving set provides a lovingly detailed Irish pub interior, exterior and backroom for the cast to move about and give far more expression than you might expect from a work with little dramatic playing. The cast all take their roles well, with a soft gentleness of expression that is perfect for the overall sentiments of the work and its more down-to-earth reduction of the choral parts. Andrew Gavin's Damon is the gentle spirit of temperance that tries to moderate Edward Grint's Polyphemus - played perfectly as more of an awkward drunken fool than an evil monster. Susanna Fairbairn's Galatea and Eamonn Mulhall's Acis bring the same kind of measured dynamic to those roles, keeping them grounded in the realism that the production strives to achieve, while still matching the opera's aspirations to create something greater.

Links: Opera Theatre Company, Opera Platform

Cleary - Vampirella (Dublin, 2017)

Siobhán Cleary - Vampirella

Royal Irish Academy of Music, Lir Academy of Dramatic Art, 2017

Andrew Synnott, Tom Creed, Sarah Brady, Philip Keegan, Tim Shaffrey, Eimear McCarthy Luddy

Smock Alley Theatre 1662 - 23rd March 2017

Aside from Marschner's Der Vampyr and one or two other obscure early 19th century works based on John Polidori's creation, the vampire story is one aspect of mythology that hasn't really been explored in opera. Bram Stoker's Dracula however has tended to present the myth in a relatively more modern context with Gothic overtones that tap into deeper psychological drives and impulses arisng out of a specific period in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century when psychoanalysis was starting to probe the dark horrors of the repressed Victorian-era mindset. Rational thought was starting to replace barbarism and superstition, but in spite of this the modern twentieth century would unleash two greater monsters in the form of two world wars.

If opera hasn't yet seen fit to explore these areas and open up the themes of vampire mythology, film and literature has; particularly in the writings of Angela Carter. It's somewhat appropriate then that it's a female composer who writes a contemporary opera based on an Angela Carter story and radio play and that Siobhán Cleary's second opera should also have its world premiere in Dublin, the home town of Bram Stoker. Vampirella manages to draw from that sense of shared history and the collective fear that Stoker tapped into, but applies it to the modern imagery of the Goth and Carter's modern feminist interpretation - some might say subversion - of myth and fairy-tale. There's something of an overturning of the roles here from the traditional fairy-tale, with the Prince of modernity not so much coming to wake the Sleeping Beauty of the past as unwittingly kill her and all that she stands for.

There is a similar blend of historical and modern revisionism in the Dublin world premiere of Vampirella. The set designs adhere closely to the familiar imagery of the dark and Gothic almost to the point of caricature, with dry-ice aplenty and dark figures in black cloaks bearing candles populating the stage. The venue of the Smock Alley Theatre, originally built in 1662, added an historic quality that if it didn't exactly give it a sense of authenticity at least provided the same kind of contrast between the historic and a modern outlook on mythology that seeks to reinterpret it for a new age. If nothing else, it provided acres of atmosphere.

Even though the story remains set in the year 1914, the plot itself is very much concerned with bringing the vampire myth into the modern age. Count Dracula is dead, killed by a virgin on a virgin horse, but his spirit and practices live on in his daughter, the Countess. It's another innocent who will be the death of the last of this line, a young English soldier called Hero travelling on bicycle through the Carpathian mountains while on furlough. The storyline follows along much the same path as the original Dracula story; Hero encountering strange locals from a village near the castle, becoming somewhat bewitched by the presence of the Countess despite her unusually pointed teeth, accidentally cutting himself and witnessing the troubling response that she has towards the spilling of his blood.

Despite the Gothic trappings and imagery of the traditional vampire story, the more modern outlook upon it is brought out in librettist Katy Hayes' adaptation of Angela Carter's story. Hero is versed in the psychoanalytical investigations that have recently been documented in Vienna, particularly in relation to female behaviour, and he can't help but apply them to what he knows of the Countess. At the same time he is aware of natural drives and impulses and cannot deny an erotic attraction in the deadly situation that can't be entirely rationalised. For a young reserved and somewhat innocent Englishman, this presents quite a complicated set of feelings.

Nature is evoked in a number of ways, again much in the same allegorical 'children of the night' way that Stoker may have applied it in his story. It's a cat who scratches the young Englishman, unable to resist its nature and the implication of course is that the Countess and her line - as a representation of the barbaric ways of the past - are no more capable of resisting those same natural urges and inclinations. In 1914 however, we are now on the cusp of the modern age, capable of analysing and understanding behaviour, but despite the apparent victory of rationalism over barbarism, Hero will end up dying in a war that takes blood-letting to an even greater and more impersonally mechanised scale.

There's a collision of ancient and modern in the storyline and the challenge for composer Siobhán Cleary is to find a match for that in the music. What kind of influence can you draw upon to create a contemporary Gothic score? Some of the influences might be evident and others surprising, but Cleary comes up with an unusual blend drawn from a number of sources that successfully finds its own voice specific to the drama. There's frequent use of a chanted chorus with tight harmonies, some traditional European folk influences, some string quartet arrangements that suggest the romanticism of Schubert (Death and the Maiden?) or something more like Brahms in order to evoke a sensibility closer to the turn of the twentieth century setting.

The hints of older forms of music are blended with a more modern use of sounds, electronics and atmospherics that have more to do with the Spectralism of Grisey and Murail, but greater use of the harp gives a softer and more romantic edge that is more akin to the music of Kaija Saariaho. Individual instruments are also assigned to individuals, but even the singing of each of the characters has its own style. Sarah Brady produces a beautiful and assured lyrical soprano for the Countess; Tim Shaffrey's narrative baritone is electronically enhanced and supplemented for the observing spirit of Count Dracula; Philip Keegan's no-nonsense Hero is given more spoken dialogue than singing; as is Eimear McCarthy Luddy as Mrs Beane, although with her character's sing-song Scottish accent, she is more prone to breaking out into lyrical phrasing in a lovely singing voice that isn't used enough.

The latter character also introduces an element of humour into the otherwise moody proceedings, a tone that is undoubtedly in the spirit of the original to prevent it from being taken too seriously or gothically, but it doesn't always seem to sit well. The varied patterns, textures and styles of the music however do manage to acquire an unexpected coherence through Andrew Synnott's conducting of the RIAM chamber orchestra. Lyrically and dramatically Vampirella might not make any great statement, but it shows Siobhán Cleary as a composer willing to try to find an appropriate lyrical style for the needs of a dramatic situation that incorporates many of the characteristics of the Gothic-Romantic; not so much viewing the horrors of the past through the eyes of today, but reflecting on today with a foot in the past.

Links: RIAM, Smock Alley Theatre, CMC Ireland