Theatre review: The First Child is dark, strange and hugely enjoyable
Sarah Shine, Joan Sheehy and Caia Leseure in The First Child. Picture: Ste Murray
★★★★☆
In 2015, Donnacha Dennehy and Enda Walsh gave us the first part of this accidental trilogy: The Last Hotel. That opera was based on the true story of a woman’s assisted suicide, but, as you’d expect from Walsh, was transformed into something mythic, which took in the absurdity and banality of modern life, combined with an eerie otherwordliness.
The third outing of this duo, in a production by Landmark in association with Irish National Opera, is very much in keeping with these themes. It also echoes the second instalment, The Second Violinist, in its portrayal of our fractured digital second lives, their damaging connotations and the way they allow data capitalism insidiously colonise our selves and our relationships.
We begin with a jarring sequence that suggests much and resolves little. A children’s choir arrives in party attire, but sings, obtusely and imagistically, of death of loss. Such interpolating arias become terribly clear in their import later on. But as the opera unfolds, they add a layer of myth and mystery to a story that sets out in suburban banality.
In a witty nod to the age-old operatic trope of the love triangle, we get a meet cute between a shop assistant Karen (Sarah Shine, soprano) and first-time father Simon (Emmett O’Hanlon, baritone), the grandeur of operatic duet contrasting with their discussion on the merits of baby carriers.
But there is darkness here, and not simply the alienation of the unhappily married (mezzo Niamh O’Sullivan’s Alva is Simon’s other half – a successful influencer, promoting happiness but not finding it), or the loneliness of the Tinder user. Karen’s youth and old age are woven into the story via Jamie Vartan’s set, which has a care home bed for the ghost of Karen future, so to speak, played by Joan Sheehy, and, stage left, her teenage bedroom, where Junior Cert revision is interrupted by the most vicious kind of social media bullying.
As a revenge plot unfolds, we realise this has been a simple tale all along, with that simplicity cunningly disguised. But we are carried along always by the Crash Ensemble in excellent form, giving rich depth and warm sound to Dennehy’s shimmering, propulsive, sometimes spiky but always compelling music.
And though we veer close to another operatic cliche, that of the bloody revenge, a bravura flourish, what amounts to a transposed overture in visuals and music, takes us to new territory, evoking a purgatorial circularity, a strangeness befitting the world Walsh and Dennehy have created.
- Until October 9, dublintheatrefestival.ie
