Chamber Made

Composed by:  Nick Vines

Text by:  Sam Sejavka after his play of the same name

Conducted by:  Brett Kelly

Stage Direction:  Douglas Horton

Stage Design:  Anna Tregloan

Lighting Design:  Paul Jackson

Performers:  Simon Meadows, Anna Margolis, Sally Wilson, Michael Gillies Smith, Matthew Champion 

23 August - 10 September 2006

 

With great wit and irony, The Hive investigates how the modern world goes about creating and exploiting the myth of the artist, in this instance World War 1 poet, Rupert Brooke.  Brooke was regarded as the 'Golden Boy' of the Bloomsbury Group, a coterie of prominent artistic and conceptual figures that dominated England between the two World Wars.  It included writers such as Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, economist John Meynard Keynes, painter Clive Bell and others.

The title of the work refers to Brooke's ignominous death.  While officially praised as a valiant war hero who died in battle,  Brooke's real killer was a mosquito that delivered a fatal dose of malaria into his bloodstream - Brooke never made it anywhere near the battlefield.  The Hive is also a reference to the terrible 'swarming' of the self interested after his death.

Shifting between satire and seriousness, Brooke wanders through the opera as a hapless ghost commenting on the outrageous claims made upon his reputation, and the terrible manipulations of his work and his estate.  Acerbic to the end, Brooke's incisive wit and wisdom rivals the very best of Oscar Wilde.