Opera: The Last Hotel
By Enda Walsh and Donnacha Dennehy
The Lyceum, Edinburgh International Festival, August 8
Rating: ***
The Last Hotel, a new opera by Donnacha Dennehy and Enda Walsh, puts four people on the brink of a breakdown in a hotel for the weekend and force-feeds them alcohol, jealousy and despair until they burst.
Acclaimed soprano Claudia Boyle is Woman. She has abandoned her children and plans to kill herself. Nobody plans to stop her.
She has history with Robin Adams’s Husband, a boorish, swaggering bully who flirts with her to the dismay of his neglected Wife (Katherine Manley). All the while, Mikel Murfi lurks and scowls and serves, as his Caretaker evolves from comic relief into a sinister agent.
The eponymous hotel is not sure if it’s half-built or half-derelict: the set is dressed in bare plasterboard and retro wood veneer and scattered with the stray detritus of the hospitality industry.
“Who has made love here and woken here with regret?” Woman sings. “No one.” Bona fide Celtic Tiger ghost hotel or not, it speaks of failure and collapse, and as a stage for the colliding lives of its four burnt-out protagonists, it could not be more apt.
Donnacha Dennehy’s shifting, subtle, shimmering harmonies and disharmonies lend the tension of a taut piano string to the work. Inside the claustrophobic hotel, the orchestra hints at a world outside, and a world beyond.
There is the waft of a wet weekend in the air, and the score of almost-digital bleeps and bloops have a suggestion of the internet. It’s wild, beautiful music with the energy to match both Adams’s rousing gusto and the subtlety of Boyle’s soaring arias.
The music is punctuated by blasts of ordinary sounds – the TG4 weather forecast, the crash of yelled conversation under the muffled bass of nightclub music.
The realism of the dialogue and its interpretation is evocative and vivid, but it is also The Last Hotel’s weak spot. At times, it feels like a series of pot-shots at low culture, vernacular architecture, and lower middle-class taste.
Husband, a tradesman, boasts of the large extension he plans for their terraced house, the audience laughs at his slideshow, and Wife vomits. Later, at the hotel’s seedy nightclub, the Caretaker-cum-DJ plays harsh, violent house music, which seems to bring Woman pain rather than ecstasy as she writhes on the floor. Woman takes a selfie purely because that’s something that makes her look vain.
But If the Last Hotel has something to say about drunken, over-stuffed contemporary society, saying it this way serves to alienate rather than satisfy.
The Last Hotel is at the O’Reilly Theatre, Great Denmark Street, Dublin 1, from September 27 to October 3 as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival