A Star Next to the Moon review – McNeff’s vivid new opera with guitar, gangsters and a ghost town

A Star Next to the Moon, Stephen McNeff’s new opera, premiered by the Guildhall School, has been more than 17 years in the making. It was in 2006 that McNeff first read Pedro Páramo, the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo’s strange, discomfiting 1955 novella – sometimes claimed as one of the earliest examples of Latin American magic realism – and soon after he realised its potential as an opera. A few scenes were workshopped as part of Covent Garden’s development programme in 2010, but it was not until the Guildhall School offered McNeff the opportunity to write a new work that he was able to complete the opera as A Star Next to the Moon, which was Rulfo’s original title.

The plot tells the story of Juan Preciado, who promises his mother on her deathbed that he will seek out Pedro Páramo, the father he has never met, in the distant town of Comala. When he arrives there he finds a ghost town ravaged and destroyed by Páramo’s gangster-like greed and brutality. It’s a place in which past and present, the living and the dead, seem to coexist, and Juan finds that he is just one of many children that his father has disowned. Aoife Mannix’s libretto pares down Rulfo’s text to 13 pithy scenes; Juan is at the centre of things in the first half of the opera as he uncovers Comala’s awful history in a series of flashbacks, but in the second he is just an observer, as Páramo’s cruelty and final demise are acted out.

In the first half especially it is not always easy to follow what is going on, and who is who, though the more linear narrative of the second is more straightforward. Though his habit of repeating lines of text for emphasis becomes a bit tiresome, McNeff’s vocal writing feels graceful enough, but his orchestral music seems essentially reactive; it’s undeniably vivid and imaginatively scored, a guitar adds a touch of local Mexican colour, but never gives the sense of driving the action forward.

With Dominic Wheeler conducting, Martin Lloyd-Evans’s production does what’s necessary to keep things moving without ever really making them as clear as they might be. Some roles in the large cast are doubled; at the performance I attended Alaric Green was the imposing, monstrous Pedro Páramo, with Ana-Carmen Balestra as Susana, the Ophelia-like wraith who is the only woman capable of drawing a spark of humanity from him; Steven van der Linden was the lucid, no-nonsense Juan Preciado, whose role rather fades in significance as the opera goes on, and Shana Moron-Caravel his mother. But all the singers, soloists and chorus, work very hard; the energy of it all is undeniable.

• A Star Next to the Moon is at Silk Street theatre, Guildhall, London, on 1 and 4 March