Two voices on Sunken Garden @HollandFestival, part 1. Henri Drost: "much more than 3D film opera"

Holland Festival

Forget all the fuss about the first ever 3D film opera, forget all the fuss in British newspapers. Michel van der Aa himself sighed in interview that, on reflection, he would have loved to have made the second 3D film opera. And perhaps he had also reversed the London-Amsterdam order.

Sunken Garden, however, is not about the 3D film, and the British press was not only hopelessly divided, but simply wrong. Because no, Sunken Garden is not the future of opera, nor does it have that pretension. Instead, it is a stunning symbiosis of music, film and theatre with an ingenious libretto that initially takes its time quietly, but then works at breakneck speed towards the final chord.

What begins as a detective soon becomes an occult fairy tale, but ultimately turns out to be a contemplation of guilt, death, love, madness and survival instinct. Big themes familiar to us from previous work by both librettist David Mitchell and Michel van der Aa. 

Both are able to bring different storylines together and reduce sometimes downright implausible situations to recognisable, almost universal, narratives, even moving them. At the same time, both show a visible and audible pleasure in playing with genre conventions and archetypes.

In Sunken Garden, a Faustian pact and an Orpheus-like journey to the underworld are effortlessly recognisable, and the pursuit of immortality involuntarily recalls Janacek's Véc Makropulos.

Sunken Garden, however, mainly evokes Van der Aa's own After Life in memory. Central to that opera was the question: what was the most decisive moment in your life? It was asked of recently deceased people who ended up in a kind of intermediate station. By the friendly but bureaucratic staff of this intermediate station, this moment is then reconstructed on film and that memory - and only that - is given to the deceased after a week into eternity. For some, the question of the most decisive moment is easy to answer; others refuse to choose or come to the conclusion that their lives have been a succession of 'ordinary' moments.

Whereas in After Life the characters are allowed to take a decisive moment with them, in Sunken Garden the characters actually want to forget a decisive moment. The death of a child, a fateful unhappiness caused by a text message, the euthanasia of a mother - as the opera progresses, we get to know the stories behind the characters and thus their motivations. In After Life, doubt strikes because there is only one choice to be made, in Sunken Garden this happens when a choice has to be made between living with the memory and the guilt or not living anymore and forgetting everything - merging into the garden.

There are also many parallels in the form. For instance, both operas end with filmed fragments connecting loose threads, and interviews filmed in documentary style turn out to hold the key. And although the intermediate station between life and death in Sunken Garden is a garden filmed in 3D, Van der Aa does not use it purely as a special effect here either.

Because, as in After Life, the projections are not just a backdrop but an essential part of the action. In After Life, the filmed characters flowed seamlessly into the characters on stage; in Sunken Garden, the set appears to flow seamlessly into the 3D projection. However, this does not always work, as the surtitles, so missed in London but present in Amsterdam but present, caused an unwanted distraction from the 3D film image, at least for me.

Musically, however, Van der Aa has grown enormously, and more than before he seemingly effortlessly combines all possible genres, this time including clever pop and drum 'n bass. There is no loose sand anywhere: orchestral sound and the electronic layer are perfectly integrated.

Without a doubt, Michel van der Aa and David Mitchell have created a fascinating film opera, on which it is difficult to put a label, that raises questions and forces the viewer to think. What was the most decisive moment in your life? And what price are you willing to pay to forget it?