Bliss in Hell – An Operatic Vision

Mismatched clothing, awkwardly shaped bags, and diverse shapes. Grand dames of the art establishment, slouching over champagne glasses; the occasional cape tuxedo. Even the former Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett is present, immaculately dressed yet incapable of concealing his political pedigree. It must be the opening night at an opera in the Melbourne Arts Centre. That the clothing is motley, and its audience slightly shabby, is fitting. The occasion is the showing of an Australian opera, an occasion itself so rare it has caused some comment.

The night’s opening showing (Apr 19) is an adaptation of Peter Carey’s first novel Bliss (1982), with a musical rendering by Brett Dean and libretto by Amanda Holden. Harry Joy, director of an advertising agency is struck down by a heart attack at a celebration amongst family and friends. He then believes himself to be in hell, and his family and employees do little to dissuade him of that fact. His formidable wife Betty reeks of success, both actual and vicarious. Harry proceeds to have a moral revelation – he severs ties with a company producing carcinogenic products; he enrages his colleague Alex, who is mistakenly committed to an asylum. This particular vision of hell produces periods of lucidity for Harry, who, in a moment of inspiration, calls a call girl by the name of Honey B. Muse meets advertising man, and salvation is, perhaps not convincingly, imminent.

The music has meandering passages set to unconvincing scenes (Harry’s hallucinations are certainly one of those sequences), though there is little doubt that it holds its audience in sinister thrall. Sparkling, crystalline notes of jarring modernism and dissonance are frequent. Dean is one of Australia’s finest composers, and has rightly earned plaudits for his labours. The lyrical challenges posed by adapting the novel would have been mind numbing as a challenge, and the mock reference by Honey B ‘They call me Mimi’ underscores that difficulty. Michael Shmith (The Age, Mar 15) was quite right to note that this was no Puccini gem, the opera’s ‘emotions and its messages … harder to thumb’ that those of La Bohème. Holden’s tightly drawn libretto strains Carey onto the stage, depositing him on the opera scene with skill.

The performances of the characters are solid, with Merlyn Quaife dramatically attuned to her role as Betty Joy, countered by Lorina Gore’s Honey B. Baritone Peter Coleman-Wright did much to keep the interest of his audiences as Harry, though there were periods when one sensed the audience drifting into a bemused state. The direction was, for the most part, sharply captivating.

The revolving centre, instigated at Neil Armfield’s direction, captured the eeriness of hell and the bright lights on the stage set terrified and perplexed. (Have we gone neon-classical?) This hell is not one that St. Theresa proclaimed: a place which stinks and where no one loves. It is deeply sterile, a Kath and Kim suburban existence which feeds on consumerist detritus and sickness. Such a world does not preclude bliss (religious, ecstatic, sexual), which can be found in a wretched life, a world of claustrophobic families who dabble in games of incest and self-degradation, its ambitious characters captivated by the moral flabbiness that comes with ‘bitch’ success. Ambition means New York and glamour; ambition means treading on people’s toes and poisoning them with saccharine, nicotine and petrol. Harry’s father in Bliss makes it clear that New York possesses ‘towers of glass. It is the most terrible and beautiful city on earth.’

Hell has many faces, some finer and less concealed than others. The world of Carey’s Bliss is one dominated by cancer, cancer causing products, with its characters at the ‘epicentre’. But hellish confines produce escapes, spaces of retreat – the interventions of Honey B, kind hearted call girl and keeper of bees, creator of ‘The Rolls Royce of Honey’, hands the hand of life to Harry ‘Krishna’. The end scene is an idyll from Elysium, with Harry’s labours of toiling for his Queen (crowned Honey B herself) inflicted on an unfortunate sand pit that comes out of the back stage. This might simply be another evocation of Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss at the end of Candide: ‘We live in the best possible of all possible worlds.’

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

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