Mars
Leisureland, Galway
★★★★★
Jennifer Walshe’s new opera, staged as part of Galway International Arts Festival, is like no other previously presented by Irish National Opera, which commissioned it with Muziekgebouw Amsterdam, Klangforum Wien and Opéra de Lille.
This is only partly because it features astronauts and is set mostly in the command module of a rocket. What’s novel is the exhilarating speed at which it shifts between what it wants to say – about humanity, the future, history, culture high and low, colonisation – and the moods in which it says them, from comic and satirical to profoundly poignant.
Walshe has a mind exploding with ideas and a seemingly unfettered and limitless creativity for expressing them. Early in the opera’s long gestation, begun during Covid, she was already talking to the award-winning writer (and Irish Times columnist) Mark O’Connell, whose books include explorations of transhumanism and the colonisation of Mars. He ended up making a first foray outside nonfiction to write the libretto for Walshe. Tom Creed, directing alongside Walshe, completes the artistic leadership.
[ Mars: Mark O’Connell and Jennifer Walshe on their new collaborationOpens in new window ]
The four women astronauts are travelling to the planet with the intention of helping to preserve the human race. Before they reach it the project is purchased by a tech-bro billionaire. Attached to this simple scaffold is a wide range of interactions involving not only the profound but also the day-to-day realities of space travel.
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Delivering this range results in a tour de force from the four-member cast: the sopranos Nina Guo and Jade Phoenix and the mezzo-sopranos Sarah Richmond and Doreen Curran. Between them, within the claustrophobic confines of their space capsule, they convey grief and longing from separation, excitement and fear for the future, camaraderie, frustration, anger, laughter and cynicism.
Guided by the movement director Bryan Burroughs, they provide inspired re-creations of zero gravity and the violent vibration of lift-off and set-down. The singers take turns to voice Arabella, the spaceship’s on-board AI, and Axel Parchment, the obnoxious billionaire behind the takeover, his distorted AI-manufactured face superimposed on to one of the singers and projected on to an overhead screen.
Other screens depict the planet; show footage from the Apollo space programme or clips from black-and-white sci-fi movies; or relay live feeds from cameras inside the capsule. There is a lot of simultaneous information. This and the realistic technical detail throughout – visual and aural – shape the production’s power to captivate and immerse you. The large technical and design team is led by Aedín Cosgrove (set and lighting), Conan McIvor (video), Úna Monaghan (sound) and Catherine Fay (costumes).
Walshe’s powerful, expressionistic music contains the same far-flung eclecticism as the scope of her ideas, matching everything from the enormous energy of the technology to the astronauts’ whispered awe upon arrival on Mars, and incorporating Nasa sound files, AI-generated dubstep for Axel Parchment, and extended techniques for both voice and instruments.
Here, too, is a tour de force, from the conductor Elaine Kelly and the INO Orchestra, whose performance requires singing and movement as well as playing.
Mars is at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, from Thursday, August 7th, until Saturday, August 9th
