In January 2015, I was on an overnight flight coming back from New York, having attended Prototype, a festival of new opera. I didn’t sleep a wink, but worked without stopping in a packed, dark, sleepy cabin, reading and annotating a book and furiously making notes on my laptop. As if in a fever dream, my mind whirled with text, music, dramaturgy, theatre.
Those six nocturnal hours were some of the most creatively fertile of my life. The book was 4.48 Psychosis; the annotations became the blueprint for an opera. Sarah Kane’s text had unlocked something in me, a fervour, a deluge of ideas.
I could barely keep up, noting every impulse, every fantasy, as my mind pinballed around. I landed back home, back to real life, with a thud. That year turned out to be tough: a messy and protracted relationship breakup and a threat of bankruptcy and losing my house, a victim of rogue builders.
I broke out in a bleeding stress rash, and, for the first time in my life, suffered insomnia. In late summer, I managed to pull myself together. I dusted off those notes from the flight, made some spreadsheets (always!), counted the days I had to write each scene and set to work.
The opera was written at breakneck speed in six months, in something of a trance. My personal life remained fraught, but the opera, and Kane’s world, became a refuge, an escape, a joy. I followed my blueprint almost without deviation.
I wrote the most straightforward scenes first, out of order, in their matching groups: the patient-doctor dialogues, the serial sevens, the positive and negative affirmations. Slowly, a patchwork opera emerged, until only the most challenging scenes remained. Then I returned to the text; it had an uncanny ability to reveal more ideas, more music, like layers peeled back successively.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
