Brief Synopsis: A beautiful naked woman “of a certain age” brutally stabs a young man to death  (2013)

Co-created (composer, director and performer) with THE oPERA PROJECT INC.

Artists: Katia Molino, David Buckley, Nigel Kellaway, Heidrun Lohr, Richard Montgomery, Steve Meyer, Laura Moore, Catherine Upex, Ashley Kurrle, Benjamin Au, Clytie Smith, Gary Dryza, Hans Bildstein;

Performance Space at Carriageworks, Sydney.

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… The opera Project’s artistic director, Nigel Kellaway, who also directs and performs in Brief Synopsis is as much endowed with the sensibilities of a painter, filmmaker, soundscapologist and poet, as anything else. This isn’t a sumptuous visual feast in the sense of opera as you probably know it. It’s an austere vision, which makes the immense space of Carriageworks’ Bay 17 the focal point.

How so? Well, Brief Synopsis seems to be about distance: the distance between us no matter how close we come. The essential loneliness of the human soul is rarely, if ever, completely assuaged. Love is never as wholly satisfying as it promises to be, or not for long, no matter how sweet the lips or engaging the conversation.

Better yet, Brief Synopsis is a witty, welcome subversion of the form. For example, who hasn’t sat in a stuffy opera theatre, restlessly primed for a performance waiting for the orchestra to tune, the conductor to make his entrance.

Here, we are teased and taunted by an interminable wait, of a duration that tests our Pavlovian patience and politeness. The seating stack is oriented at an angle that looks directly towards a huge screen. To the right, there are a couple of cafe tables and chairs. We see the odd figure hovering in the backstage area.

A Ford Falcon panel van from yesteryear idles into view, headlights blazing. A door creaks open and a man with a double-bass case alights. He walks offstage. Moments pass.

Eventually the orchestra, a six-piece chamber outfit, strides on with the customary, unhurried sobriety, only to exit again. Is this a dupe, a hoax, a joke? Not to worry. A spotlight hits a woman at the other end of the front row, from where we happen to be seated. Heads turn and crane. Our view is but partial, until she rises. Only then do I become aware she’s starkers, but for, as I recall, jet-black heels; possibly suede. Maybe some costume jewellery was involved. It’s Katia Molino. She walks upstage, as if no-one’s watching.

By this time we’ve already been attuned to a nebulous, impressionistic aesthetic, by way of montages and repetitive, filmed sequences, courtesy Heidrun Lohr and Hans Bildstein. Off to our left, there’s another intermittent projection onto a wall. It’s just this side of subliminal in effect and is of Molino, again, naked, in the headlights.

Kellaway, Molino and David Buckley’s characters comprise an odd triangle of love and lust and it’s hard to know who’s alive, or when. Buckley spends much of the time parading around in a blood-stained white business shirt under a suit. At a certain point, Molino comes forth with a folded shirt on a silver platter. She slowly undresses him, only to cloak him in a fresh shirt even more bloodied than the first. At another, when one might have assumed Buckley’s character was already done in, Kellaway strangles him.

Richard Montgomery’s lighting design, operation and production, like Lohr and Bildstein’s videography and animation is a complex, technical tour de force. It’s rapturously beautiful, albeit in a rather Teutonic, symmetrical way.

To top it all off, there’s exceptionally well-chosen and well-utilised music by Bach Beethoven, Debussy Handel, Mozart and more. This is the performing arts equivalent of a memorable meal. Like the anticipation that attends the arrival of a soufflé, it’s a little tormenting. But, a little later, tantalising.

Lloyd Bradford Syke, Crikey.com