Contemporary music theatre usually doesn’t favour comedy; most modern operas tackle weighty political and social issues or personal dramas without too much humour. So it is all the more remarkable that two modern comic operas were staged in Dublin in close succession: Gerald Barry’s The Importance of Being Earnest (after Oscar Wilde’s play) was followed by Evangelia Rigaki’s Antimidas (with a libretto by the Scottish poet W.N. Herbert), and both had their audiences in stitches.

Midas was the ancient, mythical Phrygian king who was granted his wish to be able to transform everything his hands touched into gold, only to discover that he now couldn’t feed himself any more while also turning his own daughter into a golden statue – in one version of the legend he starved to death, while in another the gods eventually listened to his pleas and showed him how to get rid of this ‘curse’. Antimidas, in turn, is a modern banker who doesn’t care about morals, ecology, or indeed his family, while ruthlessly generating vast amounts of wealth for himself – that is, until a disgusted Pluto curses him with the help of Cloacina (the goddess of sewers and filth who concocts a magic potion for Antimidas) so that he loses his ‘golden touch’ while everything he now lays hands on literally turns into excrement. Eventually he travels to Hades to strike a deal with Pluto, yet the god is unmoved and Antimidas realises he has died while seeing his daughter – the only person who cared about him – arriving in the underworld as well.

Director John Lloyd Davies lets this modern ‘anti-myth’ come alive on a series of labyrinthine elevated walkways at the centre of which there is no Minotaur but rather a table representing Antimidas’s home or his office; Pluto and Cloacina mainly operate on the ground between those pathways and can’t be seen by those above them. Lloyd Davies’ creative use of a limited number of props proves how even a small budget can generate maximum effect, while his imaginative direction contributes crucially to the comedy that unfolds on stage.

Befitting a mythological subject set by a Greek composer, between the acts there are Greek choruses uniting the four soloists as news anchors of the fictitious ‘Shark TV’. At a news desk alongside the central labyrinth they comment on what just happened and announce the next scene in half-spoken, half-sung rhythmical declamation. Further information is provided on a big, expressionistically tilted screen in the background displaying Shark TV’s topical breaking news headlines, which serve as surtitles for much of the action. Some of the text and the rhymes are not too subtle (such as Antimidas’s speech at the banking conference or the Greek “shit” chorus) yet always highly comical and effective. After all, this is no different in Rossini operas, and betrays opera buffa’s origin in the Italian commedia dell’arte with its stock characters.

Evangelia Rigaki’s music is most attentive to each line of text and each situation’s emotional undercurrent; her guiding principle of theatricality means that not only the singers but also their vocal lines and the instrumental accompaniment have to be ‘actors’ in their own right – a kind of modern Wagnerian “gesamtkunstwerk” (yet without leitmotifs). While she provided a thoroughly contemporary score there are still nods to the past such as a Salome quotation at the end. The five instrumentalists (flute, trombone, violin, cello and percussion) under the precise baton of Lindy Tennent-Brown mastered their demanding parts requiring some extended playing techniques with aplomb; this is particularly true of Richard O’Donnell for whom Rigaki wrote some highly virtuosic, dramatic and engaging solo sections (involving coins and chains as topical percussive objects).

Of the four singers, tenor Tyrone Landau as Antimidas left the strongest impression, his nuanced, expressive voice convincing in all registers of his difficult part. He was ably assisted by Catherine May as his daughter Zoë (and Cloacina), and Tamsin Dalley as his wife. Owen Gilhooly’s Pluto delighted with his strong acting skills (he is a true operatic comedian) alongside his versatile baritone voice.

Modernist as well as post-modernist artists and composers regularly engage with burning political and social issues, yet this hour-long opera represents one of the first artistic engagements with the Irish banking crisis (fittingly premièred at the eve of Ireland’s exit from the bailout programme). It is to the Arts Council’s credit that it supported this highly imaginative and hilariously funny new piece of musical theatre.

Wolfgang Marx