The Fallacy of Art as an expression of the artist's self.

If The Garden is in any way autobiographical, I am so not going for a drink with co-creators Zinni and John Harris any time soon. Set in that difficult period when humanity seems to be warming up for the apocalypse - it's suggested that plant life has become rare, and the husband admits that the committee that is trying to find a solution is an exercise in futility - The Garden focuses on a husband and wife who are coming to recognise that their relationship troubles are an expression of humanity's inevitable demise.

An intimate opera - the cast skillfully move between spoken and

Alan McHugh, the husband

sung dialogues, with the contrasting vocal styles hinting at shifts in the power relationship between them  - The Garden  is harrowing. The bare room, the claustrophobia of the wife's daily life, the husband's work anxieties: the world is shrunk to a tiny square, in which despair can kill with the silent and gradual precision of poison gas.

When an apple tree starts growing through the kitchen floor, the jig is up, and the couple confront their existential pointlessness. The themes are a check-list of post-millennial anxieties: environmental devastation, emotional sterility, sexual doubt, over-population and the absence of value. Allusion to Adam and Eve via the apple tree only makes the universe of The Garden more godless and hostile. The final deaths are sensual releases,  not melodramas. 

The music - John Harris uses the late night mellowness of the electric piano to evoke a chaotic emotional subtext and a drowsy, languid misery - backs up Zinnie Harris's taut and suggestive script. It's a strong argument for opera as a striking dramatic form, both focussed and immediate. Decay has rarely been so seductive, resolution so bitter-sweet and death so nearly erotic.