Opera Theatre Company's 'Vera of Las Vegas' is both a romp and a nightmare, its librettist, poet Paul Muldoon, tells Arminta Wallace
Not every interview, as the reader may well imagine, begins with hack saying to interviewee: "I thoroughly enjoyed your play/book/album". This is because: a) hack often doesn't have time to read/watch/listen to said items; and b) said items, while often exciting and iconoclastic, can be as dull as a wet week. Vera of Las Vegas is certainly not dull. Iconoclastic, on the other hand, is a rather unwieldy word for an opera - or, rather, a piece of music theatre in the best sense - whose plot involves a pair of former IRA men who find themselves spending the night on the strip in the company of the lovely Vera and her glamorous friend, Doll, whose libretto contains lines such as "You think it'll matter diddly-squat to that pair in the pinstripe suits?" and which name-checks just about everything from the Economist to St Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians.
Vera of Las Vegas is, in short, a hoot. The tone of Paul Muldoon's libretto is as playful as Darron Hagen's score, with its references to Zooropa and The Billy Cotton Bandshow, is accessible. Does Vera's card read "LAPDANCER", or just "LAPD?" Why is there a chorus of Romans in Caesar's Palace? And who are the shady individuals, Trilby and Trench? The laughs come thick and fast, with plenty of the sort of sassy wordplay for which Muldoon's poetry is well known and properly acclaimed. But this is the kind of play which gets serious before you even know it.
The cartoonish style may suggest that Muldoon is simply sending up the situation in the North in much the same way as, say, recent TV sitcoms such as Give My Head Peace have tried to do. But there is real emotional pain - and plenty of it - in Vera of Las Vegas. So is it, I ask the author of its libretto, a romp or a nightmare?
"Well, you know, there's often a very fine line between the two," he says. "The critic, Edna Longley, has a great descriptions of MacNeice's last poems. She calls them 'nightmare nursery rhymes'. Two of the characters in Vera of Las Vegas are trying to make sense of their involvement with violent action in Northern Ireland, and often they're doing so in what might easily seem to be a flippant manner. But we know from our own experience that that's one of the ways we all approach difficulty - by smiling. Some things are just so bleak that one has to laugh."
The opera seeks, he adds, not to sweep away the nightmare, but to come to terms with it.
"It would certainly be inappropriate to make light of any of the murderous deeds at the heart of this piece," he says. "One of the things that it is attempting is to try to find a context for what has happened. As a society we'll probably spend a lifetime trying to contextualise this - trying to legitimise it, trying to sweep it away, trying to reposition the historical facts. Just as we do as individuals every day, when we try to make sense of what has happened to us through the day. Or as we begin, in some instances, to fictionalise - not because we're telling untruths, but because we want a story. And not just any story: we want a particular arc of a story."
Of course stories, too, can be strange, subject to shifting resonances. Vera of Las Vegas was written almost a decade ago.
"And a lot of things have changed," Muldoon says. "Ten years on, the illegal status the two men are enjoying - as it were - in the US almost seems to have more relevance in Ireland; and 10 years ago the idea of an interrogation centre as something connected with the US . . . well, that has changed too. But other things have not changed, and one of them is our ongoing attempt to work out what has happened to us. We're going to spend a long time doing that."
So how did a Whitbread Award- winning poet get involved with writing opera libretti? Muldoon shrugs. The composer, Darron Hagen, asked him to, he says, "so I set out and just blundered along, the way most other things are done. But I did enjoy working with other people".
"When you're writing poetry it's basically yourself, you know? You keep scribbling away, and nobody really gives a hoot if you do it or not."
He ended up producing three pieces with Hagen: Shining Brow, about the architect, Frank Lloyd Wright; Bandanna, a remake of Otello set in Texas, and Vera - itself a mere one-third of a larger work which will incorporate his play, Six Honest Serving Men, and a final part which still has to be written.
For a poet - a poet, moreover, who claims to know little or nothing about opera, and insists he has a "tin ear" - working with a composer proved to be a remarkably familiar process.
"Usually we write a treatment for the opera - a plan, as it were," Muldoon explains. "Act One, Scene One, what's going to happen and who are we going to see. They're built as pieces of engineering, pieces of architecture - as most things are."
This is a feature of poetry which, he says, poets and readers rarely stress. "We like to think in terms of inspiration and all the rest of it - but the thing also has to be built in such a way that it's going to stand up. An opera has to sustain various pressures, just as a poem does - or an airport, come to that."
Vera of Las Vegas, however, differs slightly from Muldoon's other collaborations with Hagen in that the libretto was written first. And though the structure is eminently operatic in its alternation of solo and ensemble pieces, the libretto actually operates on an anarchic - and highly poetic - principle of word association.
"It's written in a terrifyingly tight style and it uses a scheme that's related to the sestina, that verse form where the end words of the stanzas turn over in a certain way," says Muldoon. "So this is a huge, mad sestina."
Still more madness, of course, derives from the setting. Las Vegas is almost a synonym for OTT, a city built on sand where nothing is as it seems and, as one of the characters puts it, "days and nights are the same". These days Muldoon spends most of his time in New York, where he is professor of humanities at Princeton University, but when he wrote Vera of Las Vegas, he hadn't actually been to the Nevada Nirvana.
"I'd only ever got as far as the airport - which is why it's set in the airport. It's all made up," he says.
A subsequent visit to casino-land confirmed his worst suspicions, however.
"It's just what one expects," he says, with a fond smile. "Though possibly slightly worse."
His first-hand experience of the US ensures, however, that the American aspects of the piece are just as bitter-sweet as the Irish ones, the observation just as irreverent. While the two Irishmen are standing in the airport arrivals lounge they are joined, according to the stage directions, by "a delegation of Pequods dressed in extremely sharp suits but wearing quivers and carrying bows . . ."
Muldoon chuckles.
"The 'Pee-quats', as they call themselves - they're absolutely brilliant," he says. "I love them. They're the tribe after whom the ship in Moby Dick is named. They were virtually wiped out, but the few who were left inter-married with local slaves in Rhode Island and Connecticut, so many of them are black, or have black blood. And they've really got their act together. They have a huge casino which makes a huge amount of money for the tribe. I absolutely love that. They've got back, as it were, at the government, the society that's responsible for wiping them out."
Not many opera libretti contain stage directions involving Pequods. But then not many feature the word "discombobulated" either.
"Oh," says Muldoon. "Well, it means 'all over the place'. And there is something discombobulated about this whole thing. We want things to make sense. We want clarification, but you know what, we don't always get it - and we may not always deserve it.
"Maybe we don't deserve clarity when we've spent so much of our time muddling and befuddling and talking out of both sides of our mouths and misusing language and telling lies to ourselves and each other. Maybe we get what we deserve, after all."