Belloo undertook a development period culminating in an industry work-in-progress showing for a chamber opera adaptation of Matthew Condon’s classic novel, A Night at the Pink Poodle. We asked the artists how it went. 

This project started with you, and you've been working on this project since 2019/2020. What made you want to take Matt Condon’s novel from page to stage? 

Shaun Charles (Librettist): I’ve always been fond of the novel, which I read when it was first published in the 90s. It always struck me as having theatrical potential of some kind. All the Ancient Greek mythological references infusing a story about a real estate agent on the Gold Coast seemed (and still seems) an entirely unique combination. My background is in text-based drama, but a straight play adaptation didn’t feel like it could quite capture the scope of the work, or indeed the Gold Coast itself. Opera, at least my limited understanding of the form, seemed to offer the right palette. So, that’s how I tried to sell it to people. It took a while, folk couldn’t seem to reconcile the idea of an opera set on the Gold Coast, but finally HOTA saw the potential. What we have created is not a standard, classical opera by any means. There’s a scene set in a Cavill Avenue night club, classical opera was never going to cut it there. We now call it ‘pop-opera’ when talking about it.  

What can you tell us about the music within the work? 

Peter Farnan (Musical Director): The big challenge for me was writing sung music when there was no patterned rhythm, rhyme and strophic structure to the language, as there would be in a ’song’ … or rather the structuring was driven by textual and thematic imperatives. So while the language made sense, the delicious puzzle was to write passages that made musical sense. Some of the tools of balance, symmetry, creating and then satisfying the expectations of the ear, were not available. Where you might expect a melody to continue, harmony to resolve or a section to build to a climax (or not) there was no language (or too much) there to use. Sometimes it had all been said perfectly but I was in the middle of a musical story and had run out of words. Sometimes the words just kept going when I had arrived at closure. Shaun allowed me to take great liberties. Sometimes when I repeated or (gulp) cut text, it ended up making musical and dramaturgical sense. This process revealed even more to us about character and story. We discovered together that simple words, sometimes buried in a sentence, could rise up and gather extra poetic resonance because the music underlined them. Sometimes Shaun would tell me ‘these words are the important ones - highlight those.’ Shaun and I would hash out solutions together … and the music would suggest new imperatives that resulted in re-writes, of text then music. And at all times character and narrative led us. The process is ongoing.