Banned in Ireland. The phrase still has some weight, at a time when talking about banning anything is to align yourself with dogmatic mullahs and evangelists. It's hard to imagine how Brian Merriman, living in an Irish hamlet in the late 18th century, managed to write a literary work shocking enough to be untouchable for nearly two centuries. But the satiric bite of his 1,000-line Gaelic poem The Midnight Court is still something to wonder at, and thanks to Toronto's Queen of Puddings Music Theatre, something to sing about as well.
"What an extraordinary piece, for a hedge-school teacher in a crummy little village in the west of Ireland in 1780," said Paul Bentley, who adapted Merriman's dramatic poem for the chamber opera that, with music by Montreal composer Ana Sokolovic, will be performed by Queen of Puddings for the first time tonight. The piece has already been booked for performances in London next year at the Royal Opera House's new Linbury Theatre -- an unusual coup for an unproduced Canadian opera.
The Midnight Court is a dream poem in which the poet is snatched from a lyric reverie by a 20-foot giantess, who takes him to a fairy court to hear a suit by a woman who can't find a husband. After a furious exchange of arguments, the fairy queen rules that single men should pay for their crimes of omission, beginning with the poet himself.
Merriman was far ahead of his time in articulating women's sexual feelings and had no fear of drastic proposals to improve a stifled society, including the end of marriage and the abolition of celibacy among priests. His text suggests that Merriman expected the latter to be achieved during his lifetime, though like all good satirists he knew the value of exaggeration.
The opera came about after an arranged marriage of the talents of Sokolovic, who wrote music for a Queen of Puddings program five years ago, and Bentley, the English actor and dramatist whose libretto for The Handmaid's Tale was heard at performances by the Canadian Opera Company last fall. Neither of them had read the poem before Queen of Puddings proposed it. They both liked it and knew at once that Merriman's debating-society speeches would have to be drastically reworked.
It was up to Bentley to ferret out the clues for a more stageable presentation of the poem's vivid characters and ideas. A draft of his libretto reveals a deft revision of who says what and how, a gleeful sense of the work's fantastical nature and a bigger part for the poet.
"It's Merriman's dream, but for most of the poem he says nothing," Bentley said. "I have him undergoing dream-like, nightmare-like transformations into various things. Because that's what dreams are like."
Bits of linking text had to be created, including a short prelude for Merriman, written to match the rhyming couplets of Frank O'Connor's English translation, which was banned in Ireland when it appeared in 1945. Bentley also had to cut his original text by about half, to accommodate a setting by Sokolovic that involves a lot of verbal music not indicated in the text. One of the things lost in the cutting was the section on clerical celibacy, which takes up 71 lines in the Gaelic text.
"Believe me, as a good Catholic I felt obliged to put it in the original version, but Ana didn't want to compose it," Bentley said. "I trusted her instinct. You have to. But we also have to keep some satire of the Catholic church if we're going to remain true to the piece." Bentley's solution is mainly visual, which means you'll have to go to the show to find it out.
"There was no problem about people taking offence," said Sokolovic about her decision to leave out the celibacy theme. "It was a musical and dramatic issue," linked to the company's preferred length of 70 minutes and to Sokolovic's sense of how many ideas and incidents an audience could absorb in that time.
One other textual change, this time affecting Bentley's interpolations, came about after a chat with Dairine Ni Mheadhra, the Irish-born co-founder (with John Hess) of Queen of Puddings.
"We were having dinner, and Dairine looked at me and said, 'Paul, the Irish do not say begob and bejabers,' " Bentley recalled. " 'They say onions and shite.' So I said, 'Onions and shite it is.' " Bentley went to the first of two workshops of the piece with what he imagined was a rough idea of how the rhythm of his opening lines would come out in song. He was "knocked out" by the discrepancy between his expectation and Sokolovic's elaborate repetitive setting, which he mimicked to great effect over the phone from London.
Sokolovic seems a good bet for a piece about surreal adventures and dramatic transformations. Her music to date has shown a flair for both, even in her instrumental works. She's also a vivid orchestral colourist, which helps when your producer tells you that you can have only six players. She chose percussion, because it's both rhythmic and melodic; violin, cello and bass for their "round, long sounds"; and clarinets and accordion, for their range and because they can suggest the flavour of traditional Irish music.
She was to use only six singers, but had to increase that to 10 when the instrumentalists turned out to be too busy with their parts to take on vocal and dramatic roles.
"In some operas, it's not important to catch every word," she said. "But in this opera, I wanted every word to be heard and understood."
Queen of Puddings is staking a lot on the fervent hope that it will also be enjoyed. The company has poured nearly all its resources into its only production of the season, which ideally would surpass the success of Beatrice Chancy, the 1999 opera by James Rolfe and George Elliott Clarke that played in Toronto, Halifax and Edmonton, and was filmed by the CBC.
"It's unbelievably important for us," said Ni Mheadhra. "We want it to be the piece to put contemporary Canadian opera on the map." The London performances are meant to be a showcase for producers from the rest of Britain and Europe, including Don Shipley, the artistic director of the Dublin Theatre Festival and the former theatre programmer for Harbourfront Centre.
An Irish premiere would be sweet revenge for Merriman, whose poem was till recently known in his native land only for the 18 opening lines of bucolic verse that at one time were taught to most Irish schoolchildren. It may be time to expand the lesson, this time with music.
Queen of Puddings presents The Midnight Court tonight, Tuesday, Thursday and June 18 at Harbourfront Centre Theatre in Toronto (416-973-4000).