Page 77 - Aldeburgh Festival 2022 FINAL COVERAGE BOOK

Having decided 'let's make an opera' there was a question of now what?

Writing an opera has always been an aspiration for Tom. He is from a family of theatre
people and has always enjoyed reading plays, and he always wanted to find something
where he could get really excited by the words and then set them to music. He first met
Alice in 2014 and she sent him some of her plays, then he saw her play Revolt. She said.
Revolt again (which premiered at the Royal Shakespeare Company as a part of the
Midsummer Mischief Festival in June 2014) and was blown away. They both became
excited by the idea of creating an opera, but having decided 'let's make an opera' there
was a question of now what?

Tom Coult (Photo Tim Lutton)

Tom admits that he doesn't routinely come up with narratives and stories, but playwrights do. The two
of them came up with something together, and he has gone on to be surprised by Alice's words so
that she might send him a scene and he would not know how it would end. To start with Tom sent her
a list of things that he finds creatively exciting. It was a very varied list, but one item on it was clocks
and clock-making, something that Alice loved because there was so much detail. This led them to the
idea of exploring the way time could malfunction.

A strong concept, but Tom feels that Alice has imbued it with character and humanity

The setting for the opera is roughly nicked from an Edgar Alan Poe story, The Devil in the Belfry,
about a rather cartoonish village obsessed with clocks and cabbages. They used the setting (and the
clocks but not the cabbages) as a starting point, then took the plot in a different direction. In the story,