This tantalising, maddening piece was commissioned by the Manchester International Festival and Opera North to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the beginning of opera. Presumably its creators, the multimedia puppeteers Faulty Optic, were thinking of Jacopo Peri’s Dafne, about Apollo’s passion for a nymph, and his later work Euridice, since Dead Wedding is similarly inspired by classical myth: Orpheus’s quest to rescue his wife Eurydice from Hades.
With snatches of text, music by the avant-garde composer Mira Calix and a riot of visuals, the company sends the story hurtling through time and space with an aesthetic that is part dreamscape and part brutal modernity.
A hulking, horned shadow surveys a kingdom in which two angular metal structures loom, like the skeletons of a pair of long-extinct quadrupeds. Revealed as a corpulent demon, the creature plays a tombstone-shaped fruit machine that spews pennies, harvested, perhaps, from the closed eyes of corpses. Eurydice, bald, ravaged, in a tattered white gown that suggests both a bride and a hospital patient, tries to scrub herself clean while a voice intones shards of what might be memories of a splendid wedding day: “Baskets of rose petals . . . mutton and vine leaves . . . a garland of lavender and sweet herbs.” Hollow-eyed Orpheus, who has lost the use of his legs, desperately tries to reach her by propelling himself along a railway track that ends in mid-air.
Such striking imagery abounds, rendered in puppetry and video animation. Eurydice and Orpheus appear as a helpless decorative couple atop a tiered wedding cake; a wire over the railway track becomes the string of a giant lyre; snarling Furies flap and flame. Calix’s music lilts, whines, rattles, grates and bangs.
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But it all becomes too whimsical, too self-conscious. The piece never recovers the intensity of its opening moments; it flutters around themes of ageing, bereavement and the impossibility of total spiritual union, and you long to pin it down. At its less frenetic, though, it is delicately affecting.