Sometimes, opera can go straight to the heart of the here and now. Oma, a Syrian refugee, is marooned on the 12th floor of a tower block, yearning for permission to stay in the UK and carrying the terrible memory of her dangerous Channel crossing in a flimsy boat. She is unaware that other lonely, desperate people are just down the corridor: Edward, a Jamaican widower with undiagnosed dementia, and Grace, a student beset by a menacing voice in her head.
Glyndebourne, stepping away from the opulence we normally associate with its productions, has encapsulated today’s pressing social issues in a single chamber opera, one devised by talking to young people, care home residents, mental health groups and others in each of the towns and cities to be visited by the Glyndebourne Tour this autumn. Audiences heading for The Marriage of Figaro and La bohème in Canterbury, Norwich, Liverpool and Brighton can see the new piece, glass human, before the main opera. In showing the human cost of this government’s feverish immigration policy, it chimes with the desperate journeys in The Boy With Two Hearts, currently running at the National Theatre, but at its core lies another modern concern: the corrosive scourge of loneliness.
