Australians cleave to the coast. But as much as we lounge and play by the shore, you would be hard-pressed to find opera on many Australians’ beach soundtracks, lest charges of elitism undermine our egalitarian mythology.
Enter Sun & Sea, a one-hour opera for which 26 tonnes of sand has been spread generously across Sydney Town Hall. There are deck chairs, umbrellas, towels, swimsuits, hats, sunglasses, ball games, Frisbees, water bottles, iPhones and even a frisky little tan terrier sniffing people’s picnic baskets. And then there are the 14 opera soloists, flown in from across Europe, performing an original song cycle that is equal parts harbinger of climate crisis doom, a White Lotus-style commentary on privilege and an ode to work-life exhaustion.
The wry libretto is set to a simple, prerecorded synthesiser sound, leaving the array of voices and the joyously full-beach staging to shine.
A wealthy mother in a red swimsuit lies on a deck chair and sings of her eight-and-a-half-year-old boy next to her, who has “visited two of the world’s great oceans / And we’ll visit the remaining ones this year!” She has noticed, while diving with her husband, that Australia’s Great Barrier Reef suffers from “bleached, pallid whiteness”.
Her workaholic husband may not have clocked this coral decline himself: he sings of “exhaustion, like lava” and his fears that his “suppressed negativity” from overwork may erupt unexpectedly. He groans like the planet.
Offsetting the carbon miles clocked up flying these divas and divos to Sydney are some locally sourced sunseekers, among them members of the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs and the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Choir. They are put to good use with simple harmonies, between “admiring chansons” that speak of jellyfish making dancing partners of “emerald-coloured bags / Bottles and red bottle caps”.
The audience is filtered into the mezzanine level of the hall, casting their eyes over these cozzied cosplayers – looking down, perhaps, to look into ourselves. This jolly picture, while affording some racial diversity, could have done with a little less whiteness – though we do get the wide range of body types we usually see on an Australian beach.
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Of course, this is not an Australian work: Sun & Sea is the work of a Lithuanian trio: director and set designer Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, librettist Vaiva Grainytė and composer and music director Lina Lapelytė, who first collaborated more than a decade ago on the opera Have a Good Day!, in which supermarket cashiers sang about consumerism while checkout automation loomed – their own eve of destruction.
In Sun & Sea, the young fear for the future, but place their faith in technology. Twin blond women in matching powder blue swimsuits harmonise about losing the Great Barrier Reef and the future extinction of fish – but perhaps, they harmonise, a 3D printer will be their saviour: “3D corals never fade away! 3D animals never lose their horns! 3D food doesn’t have a price! 3D me lives for ever!”
The lyrical turns of phrase are often delightful, with surprising word plays. Sun & Sea, which won the Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, has already toured the UK, Europe and the US, with localised references added each time. Just outside Berlin, it was staged in a Bauhaus swimming pool; in Piraeus, Greece, in a warehouse; in Rome, the orchestra level of an 18th-century theatre.
I wish there had been surtitle screens at Sydney Town Hall, displaying the lyrics in real time above the performers as each line was sung. Despite the song cycle being entirely in English, I struggled to understand many lines. A lyric sheet is handed out – don’t do what I did and forget to bring reading spectacles.
Printed on recycled paper, it’s worth reading at leisure at home. The performances will stay with me, regardless; maybe having time to digest the lyrics will inspire me in ways I am yet to see too.
Sun & Sea is on at Sydney Town Hall until 8 January.