Emma O’Halloran’s operatic double bill, Trade/Mary Motorhead, comes to Ireland after much-praised runs in New York and at the Los Angeles Opera. If the titles sound familiar, that’s because she based the operas on plays by her uncle, the writer and actor Mark O’Halloran.
As an opera, Mary Motorhead came first, Emma O’Halloran explains. In late 2017, when she was heading into the final year of her doctoral studies at Princeton University, serendipity saw an email land in her inbox. “It was for a call for scores by an independent opera company called Beth Morrison Projects. At that point opera was not on my radar. It seemed like a very inaccessible, grand thing. And it almost seemed like a Catch-22 situation, where you would have needed to have written an opera to ever get the chance to write an opera. I had written one song at the time, and I submitted that to the call for scores.”
She made the cut as one of 10 semi-finalists at National Sawdust, in New York, and was one of the two composers to come away from the Brooklyn venue with a commission to write a 30-minute chamber opera.
“For me, having very little experience of opera,” she says, “my initial impression of opera was that they tend to be very violent towards women. And why do all the women die? I thought, I really just want to do something that’s not that.”
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‘With Mary Motorhead I was writing maybe 12-16 hours a day. So I did feel like I was in a jail cell myself. It was really like I embodied that character’
The deadline was tight, and she didn’t know anyone who had written an opera libretto, so she turned to the family connection and to Mary Motorhead, whose title character has been jailed for stabbing her husband. It had made a great impression on her when it was performed as a play at Bewley’s Cafe Theatre, in Dublin. “I remember sitting about two feet away from the actress – I think it was Cora Fenton – having my soup and brown bread, and being terrified of her. She was so volatile, one minute fiercely violent and dangerous, and then the next minute very, very deep and intuitive and sensitive.
O’Halloran decided to do it as a monodrama. “I also thought, through my absolute ignorance – you know, the sort of Dunning-Kruger effect – ‘How hard can writing an opera be or an opera libretto be? I’ll do it myself.’ I messaged Mark and asked if he would mind ‘if I kind of messed around with this play of yours’? He emailed it to me and said ‘Best of luck!’”
She contacted the mezzo-soprano Naomi Louisa O’Connell, whose reputation she knew as a highly dramatic presence, and who performs cabaret as well as opera. O’Connell asked for the play, “and she got back very quickly afterwards, and she was, like, ‘Great, I’m in.’ The work was written so quickly, actually, that I didn’t have time to doubt myself. So it was great. It was one of those first times where I just sat down and was, like, this is what I think should happen here – I can’t explain why, but it needs to be this way. I also thought, sure, I’m probably never going to get to write another opera again, so I might as well do exactly what I want, and have fun while I’m doing it.”
One singer is limiting enough, but a singer who spends all her time in a prison cell is even more challenging. “They’re not even going anywhere. And I thought, gosh, I’m going to have to do something to get her out of the prison cell. So I started to think about what would she, Mary Motorhead, have listened to in her day-to-day life. I’m one of those people who, if I hear a song that I like, I’ll listen to it, like, 1,000 times, until I hate it and never want to hear it again.
‘The silences have different flavours. It could be a heartbeat or a ticking clock where it’s just an awareness of time passing’
“But it has that effect of freezing moments in time for me. So, you know, if I hear a piece of music from the 1990s, I’ll remember where I was at the time and the smell of sun cream or whatever. I started to think, what if Mary was like that? So I picked random pieces of pop music, sampled in a way that they’re so distorted you wouldn’t really know what pieces they are. I used them almost like transportation vehicles to get her out of the cell. So any time that these pop samples come in, she’s stepping into her memories. It allows her to just escape the confinement of the cell for a brief moment. It was a weird choice, but, you know, it worked in the end.”
The experience of composing Mary Motorhead was an important pivot. “I think opera has become the perfect form for me. When I was a kid, I think in about fourth class, my schoolteacher announced that we were going to do Oliver Twist as a musical. I went home that night and wrote down what I thought the scene changes to be. I don’t know where it came from, but I was literally directing it in my head. I think there was a part of me that loved the idea of being a director. And with opera you get to bake the action into the music. With Mary Motorhead I was writing maybe 12-16 hours a day. So I did feel like I was in a jail cell myself. It was really like I embodied that character.”
One of the less obvious influences on O’Halloran’s work is time she has spent performing on aerial hoops and silks. “It was,” she says, “really important to me doing it at the time. I did it for about two or three years. In no way was I any good at it, but I loved it. I loved feeling strong. We would do routines, and my teachers would talk about repetition, asking, ‘If you return to a particular gesture, how has it changed from the first time you’ve done it, and what’s happened in between?’
“There were things that they would say that made me think a lot about music. Like, if you bring a theme back, or even if you revisit a memory, how are you now as a different person? Things are always changed; nothing’s ever the same. So repetition was interesting to me – and lots of other things, too. It was sort of like being involved in another form that was creative and movement and used sound. It is just an interesting way to think about music.”
O’Halloran talks about the pacing of Mary Motorhead, how long the pauses were, “and how long would it take to regroup after telling a very painful memory. And then being back into talking to the audience again. And it’s the same with Trade.”
Trade, which in its original form won an Irish Times Irish Theatre Award for best new play of 2011, is set in a small shabby room in a bed and breakfast in Dublin’s north inner city. The two characters are an 18-year-old rent boy and his much older client. “There’s a lot of pauses, like awkward silences, because there’s two men who have never really communicated in that way with anybody else. You’re talking about people who find it really hard to express themselves.”
When composing, she says, “I would sit there, bouncing between both characters and thinking, how long can I hold this pause for? What’s the music going to do during that silence? The silences have different flavours. It could be a heartbeat or a ticking clock where it’s just an awareness of time passing. And sometimes that time is very awkward. Maybe there’s been an outburst and it’s tense, or they’ve just cracked open a can and they’re sitting down and it’s tense. But also there’s an air of relaxation.
“That’s what’s so exciting about opera, because when you have the drama you can layer emotions. Jealousy isn’t just jealousy: it could be a blend of anger, bitterness and sadness. And you can layer that into the music. That is just the most amazing feeling for me. I’m, like, ‘I know the violin’s going to scrape this pitch here and the piano is going to be doing this ticking thing.’ And, you know, you can layer it in a way where the audience might not be able to perceive it on a conscious level, but they’ll feel it in their body. That’s really exciting.”
The Beth Morrison Projects/Irish National Opera co-production of Trade (with Oisín Ó Dálaigh and John Molloy) and Mary Motorhead (with Naomi Louisa O’Connell), directed by Tom Creed and conducted by Elaine Kelly, are at Kilkenny Arts Festival from Thursday, August 8th, to Sunday, August 11th, and on tour to Dún Laoghaire, Cork, Tralee, Ennis and Navan between Friday, October 11th, and Saturday, October 26th
