That Edinburgh International Festival and Scottish Opera’s starry new world premiere opera has its roots in a Franz Kafka story makes perfect sense by the end. Adapted from a story by Karen Russell which is based on Kafka’s A Country Doctor, it stars Daniela Mack as Theresa, the country doctor of the title, who this time has been transplanted to a town in rural America.
Everyone she treats is afflicted by an epidemic of unexplained but indescribable pain, but then the smooth-talking showman and entrepreneur Lucky Mack (Justin Austin) arrives in town, promising everyone freedom from their ills, if only they’ll take a ride on his narcotic carousel.
It emerges that once people give in to his cure, they’re hooked, having to return to the saturnine Mack for hits for the rest of their lives, giving him all of their money and then other, more disfiguring payments. This is viscerally and agonisingly demonstrated on elderly addict Ivona (Susan Bullock) at the beginning of the second act, before Theresa’s daughter Noy (Gabrielle Turgeon) comes under threat.
With precise and energisingly dramatic music by Missy Mazzoli, played with volume by the Scottish Opera orchestra before Rebecca Ringst’s dazzling set of steel walkways and a blazing neon fairground ride (lit by Lucy Carter), Royce Vavrek’s libretto is clear and darkly amusing. Under Tom Morris’s direction, this dark fantasy takes on all manner of urgent metaphorical meanings, from the opioid crisis to the rise of all-pervasive populism and propaganda.
The Galloping Cure, Festival Theatre, run ended,