Few operatic premieres in these islands have created quite the advance stir of Mark-Anthony Turnage's The Silver Tassie, which had its first night at the Coliseum in London on Wednesday. Turnage is widely appreciated as a composer with a streetwise streak which identifies him favourably with an audience not otherwise readily turned on by contemporary classical music. The level of interest his new work provoked was intensified by its being based on a Sean O'Casey play.
Turnage's librettist, Amanda Holden, has stayed faithful to the plot and shape of O'Casey's work. Yet, while carrying over much of O'Casey's text into the opera, she has preserved little of the flavour of the playwright's language. Both the poetic quality and specific Irishness of O'Casey's writing have been sacrificed in favour of compact operatic efficiency.
Indeed, Holden's libretto locates the main centre of action "at a town somewhere in Britain", a decision undone both in the Act I Dublin tenement of William Dudley's set design for Bill Bryden's ENO's production, as well as in the Irish accents attempted by the singers.
The composer has drawn symphonic analogies from the four-act structure shared by both play and opera. The bloody grey war zone of Act II functions as a slow movement with chorus, and is shockingly cut into by the use of boys' voices for the stretcher bearers.
Turnage's often punchy and hard-driven style is illustratively responsive to word and situation. The challenge, taken over from the play, of integrating singing in a popular idiom that's heavily at odds with the composer's own, has been bravely met. And the characterisation is alert, Harry Heegan's changing fortunes mapped out with painful immediacy by the Canadian baritone, Gerald Finley, the mixture of resignation and resilience in Harry's parents well caught by John GrahamHall and Anne Howells.
The transformations of Mrs Foran (a vivacious Vivian Tierney) and her bullying, blinded husband Teddy (David Kempster) are better dealt with than that of Susie - Sarah Connolly's unclear words being a barrier here. The smaller roles, including Mary Hegarty as Jessie, the object of Harry's affections, are all strongly taken.
Paul Daniels conducts with bite and impact and catches as the emotional heart of the work, not an anti-war message, but the emotional undertow of the paralysed Harry, who, although the fight with Barney is ahead of him, can sing without apparent irony or resentment, "Blessed be the name of the Lord".
Runs on Saturday, Thursday, February 26th, 29th and March 3rd. To book phone 0044-171-6328300. BBC 2 will televise the opera on April 2nd.
