“There is no reason for the sudden terror, the feeling of condemnation,” the poet Sylvia Plath wrote in her diaries, “except that circumstances all mirror the inner doubt, the inner fear.”
Plath often wrote of her terror of being “horribly limited”, despite her talents and her posthumous lionisation as a persecuted feminist. It is a disquiet that many can relate to – and one that has found new expression in a micro-opera: Her Dark Marauder by Australian composer Georgia Scott.
In the work, three characters (representing Plath’s internal struggles) sit on what appear to be mountaintops, holding their typewriters above a moving sea of cloud. To a discordant score, they sing (or at times speak out loud) about crippling self-doubt: “Set me alight / Let me burn / To a speck of ash / In a mighty killing furnace.”
Plath, of course, died not by fire but by carbon monoxide poisoning, putting her head in the oven at the age of 30 while her children slept. But Her Dark Marauder, while visually stunning, creates an atmosphere of breathless oppression.
The work opens Breaking Glass, a showcase of four new operatic acts developed over the last two years by the Sydney Chamber Opera (SCO) with Sydney Conservatorium’s Composing Women program.
Breaking Glass breaks the mould for Australian arts in two ways.
First, each of the four operas is by a female composer – a small step to rectify the woeful neglect of women in the classical music world. (In 2018–19, 95% of concerts worldwide contained music only composed by men).
Second, with the live Sydney premiere cancelled due to the coronavirus lockdown, Breaking Glass instead launched online on Facebook, by merging together recordings of dress rehearsals filmed at Carriageworks with a final audio take. The slickly produced final video is free to watch, although the SCO does ask for donations in lieu of ticket sales.
Each work, guided with aplomb by female directors Danielle Maas and Clemence Williams, dives headfirst into disturbing themes: from debilitating depression to the eradication of wildlife.
Yet despite wonderfully expressive performances from opera singers Jane Sheldon, Jessica O’Donoghue, Mitchell Riley and Simon Lobelson, who are all seen up-close (with nowhere to hide) on screen, Breaking Glass is a mixed bag.
Take The Tent by Josephine Macken, which depicts a strange, nightmarish future. In this dystopian world, scientists wearing white stand over projections of long-extinct creatures. Mixing electronic with live music, this is an opera with sparse singing: instead there are ominous roars, throaty gurgles and animalistic babbling.
The result is a little too self-conscious. Claims in the program that The Tent is inspired by superstar author Margaret Atwood’s short story of the same name seems both improbable (the two artworks have very little in common) and done largely to woo the audience into the (now virtual) auditorium.
By contrast, Peggy Polias’ Commute, also a take on literature – this time, Homer’s Iliad – fares better. In this twist on the tale of Odysseus, a woman walks home alone at night. On a giant screen behind her, the monsters of the dark emerge: creeping male hands become menacing and tarantula-like; a giant eye, representing the Cyclops, threatens to all but consume the woman as she clutches her bag in fear. The music, which starts with sinister white noise, ends on a note of relief when dawn finally breaks and a purple wash erupts over the stage.
It is The Invisible Bird, by Bree Van Reyk, however, that is the freshest of the four works – showing that difficult subjects are sometimes best served through humour.
The opera tells the tale of the rare Australian night parrot, thought to be extinct for a hundred years, before it was rediscovered in 2013. Thankfully, it does not take itself as seriously as the other pieces but starts like a cabaret with its performers dressed in black tuxedos and tails and a long black, plunging dress. They sing about the macaroni penguin, the white-breasted scrubtit, the galah and the honeyeater. Often the choreography is done for comic effect: the lyric “extinct” is delivered with a grotesquely cheerful grin and an overly dramatic slice of the hand across the neck.
The scene that most sticks with me is beautiful for its simplicity. Standing in a lit, raised box, vocalist Jane Sheldon dons an off-the-shoulder green feathered shrug. When the cast sing of trees cut down by “white men” she starts to pluck off its feathers, one by one. Eventually, feathers rain from the sky.
It is a welcome relief from an evening’s entertainment that often feels claustrophobic, especially when gorged on online, trapped at home, during a pandemic. Watch this only when in the mood, otherwise it might just tip you off the edge. As the cast sing in Her Dark Marauder: “I see myself rise, wrap new skin on old bones / (burned my new coat yesterday) / and open my mouth to eat the future.”
• Sydney Chamber Opera’s Breaking Glass is available to stream online now
