Repression and uncertainty are coming to City Hall in Opera Theatre Company's production of a singular Debussy work which demands more from its cast than just singing, writes Eileen Battersby

A YOUNG, traumatised woman appears from nowhere. She is discovered by a man who has lost his way while out hunting. The beautiful young woman begs him not to touch her. A mood of wary suspicion is immediately established, yet the girl follows this older man. Debussy's strange, shadowy Pelléas et Mélisande is simply like no other opera.

"I'm mildly obsessed with it," announces Opera Theatre Company (OTC) artistic director Annilese Miskimmon as she cheerfully refers to its atmosphere of repression, the suffocating uncertainty through which the characters struggle. "It has such dark psychological power; it's so beautiful and strange. I think Mélisande is fascinating; she's a woman with no history. I love her oddness."

For Miskimmon, Opera Theatre Company's production - which opens in the elegant rotunda of Dublin's City Hall on Friday for five performances, followed by a run in Belfast Festival at Queens - is the fulfilment of a long-held ambition.

"I have wanted to do this," she says. "It took a long time to source the right space, and I feel the rotunda is perfect because it has the ideal combination of beauty and grandeur which this piece needs." Designed by Thomas Cooley, City Hall, originally the Royal Exchange, was Ireland's first large-scale neo-classical building, and the rotunda, with its coffered dome and 12 circular windows, is spectacular.

Miskimmon is well aware that this is an actor's opera. "It is about more than singing," she says. "The performers need to convey such a range of emotions and turmoil. The last time our Golaud (Robert Poulton) sang the role was at Glyndebourne. He and the rest of the cast share outstanding voices and a unique understanding of the work's intriguing theatricality. It is very much dialogue-driven and about the real humanity of people rather than opera stereotypes."

Just as the best fiction leaves many questions unanswered, this opera evolves upon limited information. Its strength lies in its off-centre realism, the vaguely distanced, and indeed distracted, exchanges. It is muted: there are no arias, the hysteria tends to simmer and is invariably bought to a pitch by the score.

CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862-1918) was a gifted pianist. As a composer, he was a true symbolist with a subtle, oblique approach to music that was both literary and visual. It could be said that his piano works are the musical equivalent of TS Eliot's poetry. Debussy's Nocturnes owe as much to American painter Whistler's smoky, watery tones of grey, silver and blue as they do to Chopin's piano pieces. Debussy maintained that it was not necessary to sing loudly - or high - in order to convey emotion. He reacted against the Wagnerian approach.

In Pelléas et Mélisande, after the man and woman leave the stage, the story continues with a woman reading a letter. She is the man's mother and she is tending her father, the huntsman's grandfather. Apart from the huntsman, she has a much younger second son, Pelléas, by a different father.

The letter is from the huntsman, Golaud, informing his mother that he has married the woman he found in the forest and that he is returning home with her. Will he be welcome?

Also living at the family castle is Golaud's young son, Yniold, a child of a previous marriage. The characters observe each other, yet they don't really converse.

"There's so much going on beneath the surface - it's this repression that I keep referring to," says Miskimmon. "It could have been such a torrid little story, two brothers fighting over the one woman, but it so much more complex. The half-brothers have their own needs. They speak to Mélisande, but, you know, they never listen to what she says."

Golaud's jealous suspicion of Pelléas and Melisande has repercussions for his young son, who is forced to spy on the lovers.

First produced in Paris on April 30th 1902, Pelléas et Mélisande, an obvious landmark in French music and ultimately in world opera, divided critics, many of whom objected to the heavy symbolism, the loss of the ring at noon coinciding with the fall from the horse, and so on. Yet it quickly won admirers, including Marcel Proust, who listened to live performances from his bed, having subscribed to a telephonic system which required using a large ear trumpet-like instrument connected through telephone lines to the theatre. He remarked on the murmur-like quality, then realised he was listening to the interval.

Debussy's opera is based on a play by the Belgian symbolist poet and playwright, Maurice Maeterlinck. Debussy had read the play on its publication in 1892 and then attended the premiere in Paris the following year. He immediately approached Maeterlinck seeking permission to adapt it as an opera.

"Debussy knew what he wanted, that particular psychological tension. Of course, he had to cut a lot out of the play," says Miskimmon, whose Belfast directness and enthusiasm make it easy to see why she, aged only 33 and already in her fifth year as OTC's artistic director, has been so successful. Her cohesive vision is inspirational, and she was the force behind the company's magnificent 2006 production of Fidelio, which popular demand wants revived.

"We'd love to do it again, if only we can find a sponsor," she says.

Beethoven's great opera came to life in a suitably dramatic setting, Kilmainham Gaol.

"It worked well, didn't it," Miskimmon muses, with impressive understatement. Another OTC triumph was the touring production of Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea with the Irish Baroque Orchestra in 2004.

MAETERLINCK WAS pleased by Debussy's interest in his play and agreed to his request to write a libretto based on it. He was less happy when Debussy refused to cast Maeterlinck's mistress as Mélisande. As a character, she is the most interesting woman in opera. Traditionally, she has been presented as a mysterious, passive victim, a creature to which disaster is attracted. More latterly, she has been interpreted as manipulative, a slightly menacing femme fatale who brings tragedy into an already troubled household.

"Our Mélisande, Claire Booth, is attempting to bring more understanding of Mélisande as a character. Following our run, Claire is making her debut with English National Opera in Riders to the Sea," says Miskimmon, who adds of the young Scottish tenor, Tom Walker, who sings Pelléas: "I've worked with him several times. He can do everything, from romance to comedy. I think he brings an open-hearted quality to Pelléas that is rarely, if ever, achieved."

The score is vital; Debussy's silvery music tells the story. It conveys the mood, the menace, the quiet chaos, the dread of something appalling about to happen.

OTC is not performing the full five-act work. Instead, it has looked to the official shortened version, originally commissioned by Peter Brook from Marius Constant, who was licensed by the Debussy Trust. Miskimmon mentions having read about the Brook production, which ran in Paris in the early 1990s. The shortened version seemed more suited to OTC's modest finances. Also, Cooley's rotunda space was simply not big enough for the full work, which calls upon 45 instruments, almost a full orchestra.

"Our production has two grand pianos, played by Hugh Tinney, who has a particular affinity with Debussy's music, and Mairéad Hurley," says Miskimmon. "And it is incredible to hear how effective this is in the space - it is organic and intimate and much more intensive than it can sometimes be with all the resources of a symphony orchestra."

The shortened version leaves out scenes such as young Yniold's encounter with the shepherd, thus removing the problem of accommodating live sheep in the rotunda. Yet the role of Yniold, sung in this production by 10-year-old Eoin Dexter, one of seven musical Dexter siblings, remains crucial. Not only is the little boy forced to spy on Mélisande and Pelléas, he also witnesses Golaud's rage at the betrayal. Golaud warns the couple (after all, Mélisande is pregnant), and eventually kills Pelléas, causing Mélisande to flee. Later, as she lies dying, Golaud is distraught and begs her forgiveness.

"I think her reaction is interesting," remarks Miskimmon. "She seems to have lost her memory. She doesn't realise Pelléas is dead."

Her baby daughter is born into a bleak situation and the play sustains its seductive ambivalence.

The original was set during the medieval period, but the new production takes place at the end of the Great War, in about 1918, and there is a sense of change about to happen. "We deliberately want that sense of impending change," says Miskimmon.

In the case of a site-specific work, which dictates, the site or the work? "The work dictates the site in terms of where is chosen, but once the decision is made . . ." - Miskimmon pauses and then coninues: ". . . It's funny, but as soon as the rehearsal process begins, the space imposes itself on the work." So a masterwork of early 20th-century French symbolism is to be performed within the formal splendour of Georgian design.

Pelléas et Mélisandeis at the Rotunda, Dublin City Hall, Oct 10, 12, 14, 16 and 18 at 8pm, and the Great Hall, Queen's University, as part of the Belfast Festival on Oct 24 and 26; www.opera.ie www.belfastfestival.com