In 2008 I saw a double bill in Trieste but first a bit about the city. It has one of the finest squares in Europe, one side of which opens onto the Adriatic. The architecture reflects the history of the city as the main port for the Austro-Hungarian empire. In its heyday it was the fourth largest city in the empire after Vienna, Budapest and Prague.
James Joyce came to live here as did Jan Morris. It is a lovely place to explore for a long weekend if you like soaking up faded grandeur, sitting in cafes and it will be a bonus if there’s something on at the Teatro Verdi. We saw Kurt Weill’s, The Seven Deadly Sins, and Leonard Bernstein’s, Trouble in Tahiti.
Last weekend Goodenough College and Bloomsbury Opera collaborated to put on an intriguing double bill. Director, Jorge Balça, started with the idea of putting on Trouble in Tahiti. I imagine, I should have asked him, that he was wondering what to pair it with as Trouble is one act. He realised that Trouble drops the audience into the story without any explanation. It is about a young married couple, Sam and Dinah, living in suburbia with all the trappings of success except happiness. So Jorge wrote the lyrics for a one act prequel and Alannah Marie Haley wrote the music. Pacific Pleasures was born. The production drew the two pieces together artfully and the music too but the latter so subtly that you need to know Trouble to pick up on the allusions. I couldn’t remember it well enough to appreciate the rhythms and harmonies Alannah uses to evoke Trouble.
You may be wondering what the story has to do with Tahiti. The answer is that Sam and Dinah go to see a film with that title.