Ready for launch: Mark O'Connell and Jennifer Walshe on Mars, their new collaboration

Irish Times

6 days ago

A great deal can happen in nine months, so imagine what might transpire en route to Mars. Political power may shift, regimes may topple, the leadership of the colony itself could even have changed by the time you got there. You might also have forgotten to pack your collection of edifying films, and have to rely on endless repeats of Real Housewives instead.
Mars, a new opera by the composer
Jennifer Walshe
and the writer
Mark O'Connell
, is for anyone who has ever dreamed of life in space, and for all those who remain curious about calamities here on Earth. Would a Martian colony be a utopia, a brave chance to start over and get it right or a hellish vision of life under the sway of the billionaires competing in today's space race?
Whatever about getting to the planet, a piece of Mars is actually now here in Ireland, lurking somewhere in the carpet at Artane School of Music, where the cast and crew of this
Irish National Opera
production have gathered for rehearsals in advance of its premiere at
Galway International Arts Festival
.
'I bought it online,' Walshe says cheerfully. Were this anyone else you'd assume they'd been duped by a fake. But Walshe happens to be a professor of music at Oxford University, so she took the opportunity to study the real thing under the microscope at the institution's museum of natural history.
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Mars: Jennifer Walshe and co-director Tom Creed. Photograph: Ste Murray
'It was a tiny, tiny fragment of a Martian meteorite – we're talking just a bit bigger than a grain of sand. Then we knocked it, and it's lost.' She pauses. 'So we like to think that the carpet is consecrated, with a piece of Mars buried in it somewhere.'
It is the kind of vaguely absurd but enlightening contrast that Walshe delights in.
Today she has rushed to Dublin from Roscommon, where she lives when not in Oxford, delayed, she says, by her cat having sicked up hairballs during the night. Walshe was consumed en route by a podcast in which Peter Thiel, the PayPal cofounder, suggests that Elon Musk has probably
given up on going to Mars
after he realised that, even there, 'the woke AI will follow you'.
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Jennifer Walshe on AI music: 'If you came up with the idea for I Glued My Balls to My Butthole Again, is that art?'
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O'Connell, who is equally up on developments at the barking edge of billionairedom, describes the interview, with Ross Douthat for the New York Times, as terrifying.
Mars writer Mark O'Connell. Photograph: Alan Betson
Watching the pair bat ideas and references back and forth as they conjure a world in which advances (or regressions, depending on your point of view) don't move fast enough for a certain part of the ultrawealthy class is like observing a game of intellectual keepie-uppie. As readers of this newspaper will know from his
weekly column
, O'Connell has the kind of incisive mind that can cut through noise to grasp the essence of what matters.
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All of Mark O'Connell's Irish Times columns
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The pair had already collaborated on a musical exploration of Mars, having got to know each other following the publication of O'Connell's first book,
To Be a Machine
, in 2017, in which the Dublin-based writer explores transhumanism, the quest to augment bodies through AI and tech.
Mars: The cast and creative team in rehearsals. Photograph: Ste Murray
There is something fascinating about the compulsion to change, add to or otherwise manipulate your body in search of some ersatz idea of perfectibility, especially when looked at in an operatic context: opera singers themselves represent a certain perfection, conjuring extraordinary music from their bodies, combining it with acting talent and athletic stamina, all resourced through training and breath rather than cryogenics and plasma transfusions.
But transhumanism, Walshe notes, is a different kind of drive. 'I think it's very much this obsession [that] if you don't try to live forever, or biohack or microdose, it's a failure of imagination and ambition,' motivated, she thinks 'by the fear that life is finite'.
Maybe someone should read Gulliver's Travels to those pursuing eternal life: 300 years ago Jonathan Swift described his immortal Struldbrugs as being subject to the follies and infirmities that 'arose from the dreadful prospect of never dying. They were not only opinionative, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative; but incapable of friendship, and dead to all natural affection.'
O'Connell is thoughtful and measured, seemingly aware that he could win many an intellectual argument but preferring discussion to domination. It's a trait that seems particularly apposite to the subjects at hand: just because you can doesn't mean you should.
The pair's energies are well balanced, as Walshe is one of those women who have been fortunate in growing up without deciding that they needed to hide their minds. She is also comfortable with mixing references from high and low culture, to excellent effect. (She loosely based XXX_Live_Nude_Girls!!!, her Barbie-doll opera from 2003, on Aristophanes' comedy Lysistrata.)
In the rehearsal room in Artane, the four women astronauts are preparing for their Martian journey, on which they will be accompanied by an AI interface. Tom Creed is directing the opera with Walshe, focusing on the nuances of action that will bring the drama to life, as Elaine Kelly conducts.
Mars: Conductor Elaine Kelly in rehearsals. Photograph: Ste Murray
White spaceboots are lined up, there is a row of helmets, and the hexagonal capsule that stages the action for the first part of proceedings awaits lift-off. The astronauts, Sally, Valentina, Svetlana and Judith, named for the first four women in space, sing of safety protocols, of the glory of their mission, and ask, 'Why are we going to Mars?'
Mars: Jade Phoenix (Valentina), Nina Guo (Sally), Doreen Curran (Svetlana) and Sarah Richmond (Judith). Photograph: Ste Murray
O'Connell had been exploring the idea of Mars colonisation for
Notes from an Apocalypse
, his 2020 book, when Walshe contacted him; he had also been to the Mars Society convention in Los Angeles.
'I was taking the temperature of the idea. They have a pastor in the Mars group,' he says. 'He's invested in the religious implications of colonising Mars. And there were a lot of crypto people.
'I saw it at the time, and still do to a large extent, as a symptom of this apocalyptic moment: capitalism seems to have reached this end-of-the-road phase, with climate change, stagnation and so on. And this is like a political renewal project. It's like America all over again; going back to year zero and not having all the mistakes.' He pauses before adding wryly, 'Like democracy, votes for women, all that stuff.'
'It's seasteading' Walshe agrees, referring to the idea of creating autonomous communities in international waters, untroubled by regulation and law.
Beyond the regular outings of science fiction, space travel has been culturally prominent recently. Samantha Harvey's remarkable
Orbital
won the 2024 Booker Prize, Jimmy McAleavey's play
Static
has just finished a run at the Abbey and, in what passes for the real world, six women, including the pop star Katy Perry, briefly touched space in April courtesy of Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin venture – a
jaunt
that was soon referred to as one giant stunt for womankind.
Political developments have been catching up with Walshe and O'Connell's production too. 'I don't think that either of us would have thought we would have written an opera about fascism at a time when fascism is actually on the rise,' Walshe says. But that's the thing about art: it finds its relevance over time.
Art matters to both of them. O'Connell describes how 'certain artists, certain film-makers, would get to you at a certain point and rewire your brain.'
David Cronenberg
'was that for me'.
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David Cronenberg on his wife's death: 'I wanted to get into the coffin, to be with her body'
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Walshe's defining moment happened when she was 10. 'We lived in San Francisco for six months, because my dad was doing stuff in IBM, and I have this bizarre memory. It was Halloween, and I wasn't allowed go out trick or treating, because, you know, it's America – they're worried they're going put razor blades in things.
'So my father said, 'I'll tell you a ghost story instead.' But 2001 was on the telly, and he was really excited to watch it, so it was in the background.'
Walshe remembers, as her father wove his elaborate and scary tale, watching Stanley Kubrick's space odyssey play silently in the background.
Back in the rehearsal room, our four astronauts don't yet know what they're getting into when they land on Mars. Their vocals sweep from operatic bel canto to something more unusual.
'There's loads of stuff I'm asking them to do that their singing teachers never would,' Walshe says. 'I'm saying, 'No vibrato, and I want you to gliss from here to here, and that person is going to be glissing from there to there,' so you're going to hear all these crazy interference tones. It'll sound like a synthesiser,' she concludes with satisfaction.
Thanks to a brainwave from O'Connell, the music associated with the opera's sinister billionaire is 'bad EDM. That's electronic dance music,' says Walshe, who has created some of the music with the aid of artificial intelligence.
I picture the singers brostepping to the stars, and realise that we must do our absolute best to fix life on Earth first, before it's too late.
Mars, an
Irish National Opera
co-production with Opéra de Lille, commissioned by Irish National Opera, Muziekgebouw Amsterdam, Klangforum Wien and Opéra de Lille, is at
Galway International Arts Festival
from Friday, July 25th, until Sunday, July 27th, and at the
Abbey Theatre
, Dublin, from Thursday, August 7th, until Saturday, August 9th