Cries of Rage

Premieres of Music-theatre pieces at the Linbury and Cockpit Theatres

Stephanie Dufresne, Amy Ní Fhearraigh (Rosemary) and Ronan Leahy in Least Like the Other Photograph by Kip Carroll

Two new music-theatre pieces for chamber forces opened this month, both treating difficult subjects, one based on fact - David Irvine and Netia Jones’s Least Like the Other (Searching for Rosemary Kennedy) - the other on fiction - Noah Max’s The Child in Striped Pyjamas, the plot drawn from John Boyne’s best-selling 2006 novel, adapted two years later as a film.

Irvine and Jones’s piece came to the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Theatre courtesy of the enterprising Irish National Opera, which gave the world premiere at the Galway International Arts Festival in 2019. INO may be only five years old, but it has already made waves both in Ireland, and at Covent Garden with its acclaimed staging of Vivaldi’s pasticcio, Bajazet in 2022. The company, headed by artistic director, Fergus Shiel, conductor of the Rosemary Kennedy piece, is also a well, if not lavishly, subsidised outfit, while Jones, responsible for both the staging and the creative process on the text, is already an established international name among UK-based directors (her production of Mozart’s Figaro was revived at Paris’s Opéra-Garnier in December).

By contrast, Max’s Child in Striped Pyjamas, which ran for only two performances at The Cockpit - INO did four at the Linbury - is a relatively low budget affair, but a redoubtable logistic achievement since the talented young composer, still only 23, wrote both the music and the libretto, raised the money, and generated most of the publicity for two sellouts of Guido Martin-Brandis’s austere, yet atmospheric, in-the-round staging.