AN OCEAN of Rain – a co-production between Theatre Cryptic, the Aldeburgh Festival, London's Almeida Theatre and the Dutch Ensemble MAE – was panned when it premiered this year in Aldeburgh. The evidence from this Glasgow reworking by its artistic c
reators – director Cathie Boyd, composer Yannis Kyriakides and librettist Daniel Danis – suggests a mild sharpening up of its stage presentation.
Billed as a chamber opera, its focus immediately falls on the music, a mix of electronic soundtrack and instruments that include violin, recorders, Indian accordion, electric guitar, bass and trombone.
The characters are a prostitute and possible murderess Kiev, Sister Delhi (a kind of Mother Theresa of Haiti, who runs an orphanage), and a trio of women who, as tourists, appear to be on a kind of psychological guilt trip.
But do they exist? As the action unfolds, and they finally face their own projected images in body bags after a tsunami, they appear more as memories in the mind of Kiev, who has turned from sex worker to Sister Delhi's successor via her own self-harming immolation.
So, lots of heavy issues in a production that hits the emotional mark sporadically but equally dips sadly into self-absorption and mystification.
The same can be said for Kyrikiades' music, its electronic whooshing and howling occasionally finding its feet with intriguing interplay between the live instrumentalists (under Bas Wieger's direction) and background choruses of a Haitian flavour.
In the one spoken role, Claire Prempeh plays a suitably mysterious Kiev, and the others cope well enough with some agonisingly high sung tessitura. But in oceanic terms this opera is more ripple than tsunami.
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