Custom of the Coast
St Canice’s Cathedral, Kilkenny
★★☆☆☆
It’s a neat and potent idea. Custom of the Coast, a new opera by composer Kamala Sankaram and librettist Paul Muldoon, focuses on two women who lived centuries apart: the Irish pirate Anne Bonny and the Indian dentist Savita Halappanavar.
Bonny’s birthplace is believed to have been Cork, and her name appears prominently on the title page of the second edition of Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Pyrates.
That highly entertaining work, which was published in 1724 and has sometimes been attributed to Daniel Defoe, is also the source of many of today’s misperceptions about pirates.
Halappanavar died after she was denied an abortion at University Hospital Galway in 2012, an avoidable tragedy that generated public outrage and helped sustain the campaigning which would ultimately lead to abortion being legalised in Ireland.
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The two women, each of whom has an entry in the Dictionary of Irish Biography, are connected by the fact that Halappanavar died in 21st-century Ireland because she was carrying a child, yet nearly three centuries earlier Bonny was able to use pregnancy as a plea for mercy at a trial in Jamaica in 1720.
Custom of the Coast is described as “An Operatic Conjuring in One Act”. It’s cast for two singers, soprano Anchal Dhir (Halappanavar) and mezzo-soprano Michelle O’Rourke (Bonny), with accordion (Danny O’Mahony) and string quartet (players from Crash Ensemble), under the musical direction of cellist Kate Ellis.
The semi-staged presentation, directed and designed by Alan Gilsenan, with culturally apt costumes by Sinéad Lawlor, is the far side of minimal. Not least because for most of the 70-minute work the singers take it in turn to narrate their individual situations.
The stage of St Canice’s Cathedral is dominated by a large, suspended disc, which is lit to evoke both sun and ovum, with Matt Burke’s lighting design often casting multiple shadows into the depths of the chancel.
The singers have real presence and good voices and they are a pleasure to listen to. The characters’ stories have a relevance beyond time and place.
So why does this come across as such a problematic work? Partly because everything is amplified, not for clarity, but in a way that substitutes a sense of aural closeness for the feeling of intimacy. And, more importantly, because so many of the words get lost in the melange.
From the words that can be heard, it’s clear that Muldoon’s writing has a depth and complexity that the music can’t either match or support or provide an interesting background to. And the traditional music on accordion (which is the composer’s instrument) is trotted out as a kind of pig-in-the-kitchen cliche.
On this hearing, I couldn’t help feeling that the baggage of opera has burdened what might more successfully have been conceived as a standalone concert work.
