I have always been fascinated by people. Observing them, figuring out what makes them tick. Before I stepped into the world of music composition, I studied psychology and anthropology, and I loved spending my time thinking about who people are and why they do things. In a way, I was drawn to music as a means of exploring these complicated emotions that I sometimes had trouble capturing in words.

 

In 2018, as part of the Beth Morrison Projects Next Generation competition, I adapted my uncle’s play Mary Motorhead into a monodrama, and through that process I began to see that Mark was doing with words what I was doing with music. Mark’s work explores people’s inner worlds, the often unseen events in people’s lives that shape them and make them who they are. There is a beautiful economy in his use of language – if a line of text can be conveyed through a look or a gesture, it’s not needed. His words leave space for the music, for my music, to capture all the complex and messy feelings of what it is to be alive.

 

The story of Mary Motorhead is about a woman in Mountjoy prison serving an eighteen-year sentence for a violent crime. History is invention, she tells us, a madeup story based on sometimes scant knowledge of the available facts. Each of us has a known history and a secret one. Our secret history, she explains, is made up “of all the small things that happened in your life.” This is the history that really happened – the one going on inside – something that regular history, or reportage, or maybe representation, can never really know. So, Mary invites us to hear her secret history – the disappointments and betrayals that shaped her life in the Irish midlands – in the hope that it may shine some light upon the darkness of her actions.

 

When Mark agreed to adapt his play, TRADE, into an opera, I knew he would make something special. In TRADE, we witness an encounter between two men in a guest room in North Dublin. The men are separated by age but not by much else. They are both fathers, they are both in heterosexual relationships, they are both from working class backgrounds, and they both share a secret – the Older Man visits the Younger Man from time to time to pay him for sex. This particular encounter, however, is different and both men are about to have a conversation unlike anything they’ve ever had before.

 

I wrote the majority of this opera during the pandemic lockdowns in Ireland and this text grew roots and lived inside me. I began to see these two men as mirrors for each other, reflecting back aspects of themselves that they may or may not want to see. Slowly, the music began to do that too. Ideas repeat themselves but are refracted back and transformed in various ways over the course of the encounter. I think, in writing this opera, I too have been transformed. I spent every day for over a year thinking that, deep down, all we want in this life is to be seen and loved and accepted for who we are. If even one person resonates with that after seeing this show, I’ve done my job.

 

- EMMA O’HALLORAN composer