Ulster Bank Belfast festival at Queens
What do a bingo hall, pink rabbits, shy introverts, flatpack furniture and a wannabe undercover KGB agent have in common? Well, they all appear in Brian Irvine's new opera,
Postcards from Dumbworld.
Irvine is a composer of apparently unbounded energy. With his collaborators on Dumbworld – librettist and director John McIlduff and designer Diego Pitarch – he seems to have set out to fill the new opera with misfits and eccentrics, everyday boredom, and the wildest of fantasies.
There's even a monster who might have walked off the set of
The Muppets, who gets to cavort with and on members of the audience.
It's easy to imagine that the creative meetings about the piece were brain-boiling events.
Postcards from Dumbworldis one of those works that's so fundamentally wacky, and covers so many bases that it simply seems to burst with unusual ideas.
The dozen musicians of his ensemble enter, playing, through the auditorium.
The conductor (Irvine himself) talks to the audience and to his musicians. There's lots of improvising, and a plethora of musical styles – "part jazz, part classical, part thrash, part punk, party country-and-western, part theatre," is the ensemble's official description.
The visual style often aims for a cartoonish zaniness. And there's even a community chorus which brings on local singers, some of them disabled, at the end.
But, yes, if you're expecting a big but, there is one. Musically, it just doesn't hold together.
Irvine stirs in his multifarious musical interests with indefatigable enthusiasm, but the result is like a mixture of pidgins which is so well blended that meaning is all but lost.
You get a feeling you can sense what might have been intended – and the range extends to sentimentality, both mock and genuine – but it all remains tantalisingly out of reach.
The real killer is that Irvine has his singers, who perform with heavy operatic vibrato, amplified out of all proportion, so that the text is mostly indecipherable.
The intention may well have been to create an opera that would set new standards in terms of irreverence.
But, for all its bright ideas, what it has mostly achieved is a high level of irrelevance.
– Michael Dervan
