The Selenites review: A persuasive musical focus on magic

Les Selenites

Jerome Hynes Theatre, National Opera House

★★★★☆

Wexford Festival Opera’s current artist in residence, composer Conor Mitchell, is best known for his Irish Times Irish Theatre Award-winning opera, Abomination: A DUP Opera.

The first output from his relationship with Wexford is Les Selenites, for four singers (Emily Hogarty, Amy Hewitt, Richard Shaffrey and Eoin Foran) with piano (the redoubtable Mairéad Hurley), all conducted by the composer for the premiere at the Jerome Hynes Theatre of the National Opera House on Wednesday.

Mitchell, as Abomination: A DUP Opera would have made clear to anyone, is a man of the theatre. And he staged Les Selenites himself, with Massimo Carlotto’s costume designs effectively conveying the various periods inhabited by characters the composer describes as being “lost in time”.

[ Abomination: A DUP Opera – ‘It’s not anti-DUP. It’s anti-hate speech’ ]

The starting point was the wonderful work of the French filmmaker Georges Méliès (1861-1938), whose early films show an insatiable appetite for exploring the possibilities of what was then a new medium, particularly in the area of magic and special effects.

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Magic and Music is the theme of this year’s festival, and the cover of the printed programme features an eye that echoes a famous image from Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon of 1902, a date which is multiply referenced in the opera.

The opera has a persuasive musical focus that’s lacking in either of the festival’s other 21st-century offerings (Alberto Caruso’s The Master and Alma Deutscher’s Cinderella), and its characters’ reflections on life and love are strongly projected by the singers, to a background of clips from Méliès.

[ Cinderella review: Not quite happy ever after ]

The piece is short, less than half an hour, and seemed to stop before it was properly finished. The feeling I had was of a scene being set for something larger. Let’s hope that’s actually the case.

Les Selenites is also at the National Opera House at 11am on Sunday, November 6th, as part of Wexford Festival Opera