Trade/Mary Motorhead
Watergate Theatre, Kilkenny
★★★★☆
There is an unusual family connection between the words and music of Mary Motorhead and Trade, two short operas from 2019 and 2023 by the Irish composer Emma O’Halloran. Irish National Opera is introducing them to Ireland as a double bill following acclaimed premieres in the United States.
Both operas were originally plays by the writer and actor Mark O’Halloran, the composer’s uncle. The same gritty, blunt edge that his words gave to the plays – or, for example, to his film Adam & Paul, from 2004, in which he also starred – now appear as a powerful presence in these two operas.
The younger O’Halloran reveals an impressive instinct for making opera. Combining music with a good text is a tightrope walk where you create something new but shouldn’t wreck the original. And this is what O’Halloran compellingly does. Her response to the words is expressionist, so that she maintains their rough honesty, using to full advantage her preferred musical milieu, which is the blending of acoustic and electronic sound. In her hands the addition of electronics and electric guitar to a small but classic opera ensemble of strings and winds seems just right, never parading their presence but instead just blending seamlessly with tradition and unobtrusively enhancing the possibilities.
Apart from one passage in Trade where the balance left the singer John Molloy battling to be heard, the conductor Elaine Kelly marshals these small, mixed forces well and inhabits the spirit of O’Halloran’s sound.
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Mary Motorhead is a 30-minute monodrama confined to a single set, a cell in Mountjoy Prison where Mary is serving 18 years for murder. The challenges this poses in staging and performance are mostly well met. Although occasionally a little on the nose, the lighting crucially helps transport us out of the cell as Mary reflects on key episodes of her private history.
What makes these reflections gripping is an operatic troika of words, music and performance firing on all cylinders. The mezzo-soprano Naomi Louisa O’Connell is alternately terrifying and sympathetic as Mary. Once or twice she veers towards the histrionic, but she otherwise brings here the same powerful communication of the private and interior that she gave as the forgotten Kennedy sister, Rosemary, in Least Like the Other, which Irish National Opera staged in 2019.
Trade also features a single set, a grungy bedroom in an inner-city Dublin B&B. It’s a two-hander and also longer, at 60 minutes. It is the stronger piece, not least because of the now-awkward, now-tender chemistry between the emerging tenor Oisín Ó Dálaigh, as the Younger Man, a rent boy, and Molloy, a bass-baritone, as the Older Man, who has hired him.
Over shared cans of cheap Polish lager they slowly dismantle the various barriers that separate them and reveal to each other how they’ve arrived at this moment in their lives. It is good seeing Molloy as the focus of such a complex role, and the young Ó Dálaigh is a revelation, as if O’Halloran dragged him in from a back laneway and only then discovered he had a beautiful voice.
Irish National Opera’s double bill Trade/Mary Motorhead tours to Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin; Cork; Tralee, Co Kerry; Ennis, Co Clare; and Navan, Co Meath, between Friday, October 11th, and Saturday, October 26th
