MEDIATHEK

Opera Briefs, a creative partnership between the Royal Irish Academy of Music and The Lir National Academy of Dramatic Art at Trinity College Dublin, presents the world première of Siobhán Cleary’s Vampirella.
 
Set in 1914, Angela Carter’s story tells of Hero, an English soldier on a cycling holiday in the Carpathian Mountains, who seeks shelter in a lonely castle where he meets and disarms the beautiful vampire Countess.
 
Hero’s virgin innocence saves him from being eaten alive by the beautiful blood-sucking woman, but it will not save him from the butchery of the First World War. As the lovely lady vampire meets her match in the person of a virgin boy, so Carter’s baroque prose meets its match in Siobhán Cleary’s dramatic musical composition, with playful lyricism underpinning the drama, humour and ornate language. Carter’s inspiring original material is honed into a libretto by Katy Hayes.
 
Irish talent has frequently been drawn to the vampire myth. Dubliner Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula has been absorbed and firmly embedded into the global vampire narrative. The story returns once again to Ireland, to provide lifeblood for this original contemporary Irish chamber opera written specifically for the talented singers and instrumentalists of the RIAM.