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 The collaboration between Donnacha Dennehy, one of Ireland's
best known contemporary composers, and prize-winning Irish
playwright Enda Walsh contains moments of the macabre and black
humor. But the 80-minute opera is actually about assisted
suicide.
"Whether someone has the right to decide, it's a huge question,"
Dennehy, 45, told Reuters in an interview in London, where the
opera opened last week for six performances in the Royal Opera
House's Lindbury Studio Theatre. It will be performed at St.
Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn in January.
Dennehy's collaboration with Walsh, who won a Tony award for his
stage musical adaptation of the film "Once", is based on a true
incident that occurred in Ireland in 2002, in which an
Irishwoman sought assistance to commit suicide.
The action has been moved to a seedy seaside hotel. The woman,
sung by Northern Irish soprano Aoife Miskelly, is assisted by an
English couple, sung by English baritone Robin Adams and English
soprano Katherine Manley, who have come over on the ferry to
help her. Irish actor Mikel Murfi plays the non-singing role of
hotel porter.
"It's basically that the woman organizes her own suicide and
what's even more striking about it is that she rehearses with
them first," Dennehy said. "This is the thing that really kind
of caught my attention, was the idea you'd have a structure
where you rehearse your own death."
Despite the grim theme, "The Last Hotel" manages to elicit
laughs. The English husband is concerned about the food at the
hotel buffet, and throws a fit when the mashed potatoes are off.
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He also indulges in squirm-inducing day-dreaming about how he is
going to use the money earned from helping the woman die to build an
extension to the couple's tiny house.
At the end, the Englishwoman sings that the dead woman's spirit
breathes in the walls of their home.
It is heady stuff but Dennehy, former Trinity College, Dublin music
lecturer who now teaches at Princeton, doesn't do simple.
He made a big splash in music circles with his 2011 Nonesuch
recording "Gra agus Bas" (Love and Death, in Gaelic), which combines
traditional Irish "sean nos" singing by vocalist Iarla o Lionaird
with music by Irish contemporary music group Crash Ensemble.
His next project, Dennehy said, is an oratorio "The Hunger" based on
contemporary texts by an American woman, Asenath Nicholson, who
witnessed the suffering and death of the mid-19th century Irish
potato famine.
"They should be collected for schoolchildren," Dennehy said.
"They're the most vivid contemporary accounts."
(Writing by Michael Roddy; Editing by Catherine Evans)
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