Assisted suicide is topical, and is the topic of The Last Hotel, Donnacha Dennehy’s opera premiered at the 2015 Edinburgh International Festival.

Dennehy and writer/director Enda Walsh have taken a Woman who wants to die, a Husband and Wife who are prepared to help her, for money, and placed them in a hotel. The only other person we see is a hotel porter, a non-singing role.

Jamie Vartan’s set is recognisably a hotel; we see the bare wall of a function room and the corridor above, the porter’s room – decorated with photos of women filched from luggage – and the serving trolleys and gantries. The main action takes place on a steeply-raked stage, which functions as the various locations and, illuminated by a perfect square of white light, the lift to the bedroom where the death will take

The music is a mixture of Celtic-inflected rhythms and harmonies, punching percussion, insistent piano, repetitive strings and, in context, blaring disco beats, drive the narrative inexorably on. Melodically, the female vocal lines tend to end with the uptick common in the speech of contemporary young women.

Structurally, the characters mostly sing at each other or soliloquise – there is little conversation between them, or ensemble singing. The Woman (Claudia Boyle) wants to die, because her husband has left her for another; not even the thought of her children holds her back. The Husband (Robin Adams) – who, they realise, met the woman some time previously in the course of his then work as a gas-fitter – wants the property-owning dream. The Wife (Katherine Manley) only wants his love back.

The Woman wears bodycon dresses and has flowing, wavy auburn locks; the Wife is mousy with a scraped-back ponytail, pale jeans, overshirt and shapeless parka. The Woman gives the Wife a dress and loosens her hair. The Wife challenges the Woman about death – “But will it give your rest? Will it?”

The Husband cares little for his Wife’s pain yet, when she snogs the porter during the evening in the bar, thumps the porter. He sings karaoke – a song about Odysseus.  The Woman sings a very pure vocal line with minimal orchestration, then they go up to the room and the suicide.

The opera ends with the Husband asleep in his cabin on the ferry, and the Wife watching the hotel recede, asking if the Woman has found rest. The soul, spirit, of the Woman indicates that she is still searching.

The three singers handle this well. Adams is robust, Manley and Boyle clear and well-enunciated even on their highest notes. A special mention for the mime skills of Mikel Murfi, as the porter. Always in the background, observing, attending, one wonders what he is really thinking about the three guests.

In the pit, the Crash Ensemble, conducted by André de Ridder, provides the music, augmented by the soundscapes designed by David Sheppard and Helen Atkinson.

Not a heart-warming performance perhaps, but thoughtful and, in its way, life-enhancing.