OPERA AND B

If opera brings to mind dusty old works and people taking 45 minutes to die, think again. The Almeida theatre's Genesis project is hoping to kick the form well and truly into the 21^st century, says Lyn Gardner. Guardian Reports.

A few weeks ago Jean-Frédéric Messier had never been to the opera. This week he is directing one. His production of Sirius on Earth by Canadian composer Paul Frehner and librettist Angela Murphy opens at the Almeida in London next week, one of a trio of startling new operas from the Genesis Opera Project, that aims to identify new composing and writing talent and give it a platform. Genesis is trying to kick opera into the 21st century and give it a wider appeal to people like Messier, founder of the Montreal theatre company Momentum, and a man who is more likely to be found listening to Frank Zappa than Puccini.

Certainly Sirius on Earth, a B-movie pastiche set in a future world in which crime has been eradicated due to the entire population's dependence on the drug Ambrosia, probably owes more culturally to Jerry Springer - the Opera than anything in repertoire at Covent Garden. It is not alone: the scenarios of the other two offerings in the season would not look out of place in a Royal Court season. They are Jurgen Simpson and Simon Doyle's Thwaite, set in a post-apocalyptic world where the survivors wait for a prophet, and The Eternity Man by Australians Jonathan Mills and Dorothy Porter, which rewrites the myth surrounding Arthur Stace, a reformed alcoholic who spent three decades writing the word "Eternity" around the streets of Sydney. Along with Messier, the directors of both pieces - Dan Jemmett for Thwaite and Benedict Andrews for The Eternity Man - are opera virgins who have made their reputations at the cutting edge of theatre. Jemmett, who lives in Paris, was a co-founder of one of the most exciting companies of the past decade, Primitive Science, while Andrews has just completed three years as resident director at Sydney Theatre Company, where he directed Beckett, Martin Crimp and Marius von Mayenburg. Contemporary theatre and contemporary opera may share a great deal, but just two weeks into rehearsal all three directors have discovered that getting to grips with an opera is not the same as finding your way into a new theatre piece. As Jemmett puts it, directing a new piece of theatre is "like discovering a new country" whereas directing a new opera is "like mapping a country". He points out that "in theatre you are always looking for the rhythms, but in opera, they already exist. I come from a theatre background that is about breaking things apart and then putting them back together again, but you can't do that in an opera. You can't disturb the form in the same way." This is both pleasurable and frustrating for Jemmett, for whom deconstruction has become a theatrical way of life, but he was forewarned by Thwaite librettist Simon Doyle, who, after travelling from Dublin to Paris to see Jemmett's version of The Changeling Called Dogface, sent the director a tongue-in-cheek message: "Tell Dan he can't deconstruct Thwaite, it is already deconstructed." That hasn't stopped Jemmett staging what must be the world's first opera in which death comes in the shape of an ice cream. Messier and Andrews have been similarly intrigued to discover what you can and can't do with an opera. Messier says that directing an opera is actually easier than theatre because "so many things are already defined. Mostly when I am directing theatre, I think of it as sculpting time. But music does that by itself. So many decisions have already been made before you get into the rehearsal room. The distance between two lines is already fixed by the score, whereas in theatre you can all stand around for hours deciding how long a pause is going to be." If this can be frustrating for a director, it can also be liberating, as Benedict Andrews, who describes The Eternity Man as "more like a rough and dirty song cycle than a dramatic opera", has found. "It allows you to plug into myth much more quickly.

The fact that there is a technical language for singers also helps enormously, whereas with actors you can sometimes spend days trying to get them to do something differently. With The Eternity Man, that is so important because it requires an extraordinary central performance to reclaim Arthur Stace from the tourist idea of the sinner made good." Given that the directors were, for the most part, going into uncharted waters, the choice of designer was critical to all three. Jemmett has been teamed with Dick Bird, one of Britain's most idiosyncratic and distinctive theatre designers, while Andrews chose Cloudstreet designer Robert Cousins, and Messier selected long-time collaborator Marie Claude Pelletier, best known here for her work on Robert Lepage's Far Side of the Moon. "Finding a common language with a designer is critical," says Messier. "Sometimes on a production, it takes six weeks to find out that when you say 'green' to a designer they see red. I felt I couldn't risk that on this project. But it was also about the fact that this is a new Canadian opera and I wanted to do it in a new way. Aesthetically and culturally in Quebec, we still suck up to Europe. I don't want to do a piece of work that makes a Canadian audience feel like second-class Europeans. I hope Marie Claude and I have found a way of looking at Sirius so that something that seems ugly can also be seen as beautiful." If the Genesis Opera Project is all about opening eyes to the possibilities of opera, it has already changed attitudes in its young directors even before the operas are put in front of an audience. "Once it wouldn't have crossed my mind that the opera form could be genuinely exciting," says Andrews. "But the more I have become involved, the more I have become fascinated by people singing. It is just so beautiful. There is a luxury in the purest sense of the word in watching someone getting lost in the act of singing. It is such a sensual pleasure." Messier even thinks that he might try his hand at the opera form. "I have now realised that you can do so many more things with opera than I ever imagined. I have been playing with an idea for a year that I thought was a musical, but which I have put off developing because I find the whole theatre-musical thing such a depressing world. Now after this, I am thinking maybe it is an opera. Maybe opera does have a future if it can become a free open space where people can try anything. Working on Sirius has made me discard all my prejudices about opera and opera singers.

They can act if they don't have to spend 45 minutes standing in one place while they die." Jemmett agrees that there is no reason contemporary opera shouldn't have as wide an appeal as contemporary theatre. "The trouble with opera is that the same big monuments are wheeled out again and again. Opera is either seen as incredibly old- fashioned or, if it is modern, incredibly difficult. Genesis will change that." Sirius on Earth is at the Almeida, London N1 on July 17, 24 and 27; The Eternity Man on July 23, 25 and 26. Box office: 020-7359 4404. Thwaite is at the Place, London WC1 on July 19, 22 and 26. Box office: 020-7387 0031.

In Kermit the frog's immortal Peter Bradshaw words: it's not easy being green. Certainly not when you possess anger-management issues resulting in inappropriate vexation levels and temper-loss situations. And certainly not when these manifest themselves in transforming into a huge, roaring, tank-throwing, helicopter-downing monster with an odd resemblance to Brendan Fraser. Ang Lee's account of Marvel Comics' Incredible Hulk shows that, although this is clearly an attempt at some serious summer box office, he is no sell-out, not simply grinding out a teen-centred action schlocker. With a scholar's care, Lee has created a respectful and weirdly sober version of the Hulk. He punctiliously attempts to duplicate the "panel" effect of the original comic book with clever use of split screen, but tries also to deepen and enrich our less-than-jolly green giant with a Freudian backstory about his father. There is something stately and exoticised about the Hulk that emerges: floating and bouncing angrily through surreal desertscape locations. A sort of grouching tiger, grumpy dragon.

The basic template remains. Eric Bana plays Dr Bruce Banner, a mild-mannered scientist who develops a chronic monster-morphing problem through a scientific accident. But it's complicated. Quite independently of his accident, Bruce already has a latent predisposition to turn big, green and mean. As strained coincidence would have it, his father - who vanished before the infant Bruce was put up for adoption - was a military scientist of the crazy variety who injected his baby son with an experimental strength-serum. He was imprisoned by an army general, played by the granite-voiced Sam Elliott, the father of Bruce's current sweetheart, played by Jennifer Connelly. But now daddy is released - and he is played by the shaggy and leonine Nick Nolte, the only authentically monsterish-looking guy in the whole cast. There are some more new things. Some mutation has caused the Hulk's definite article to fall off. He is now simply "Hulk". Maybe that's to sound more elemental, or maybe it's a humanising thing: a form of christening. (The Fantastic Four's the Thing came to be known by his given name, Ben Grimm, I remember, because anything else was thought to hurt the poor thing's feelings.) Perhaps Hulk will develop a surname, too, though "Hogan" is already taken. A Hulk tradition that Lee leaves relatively untouched is his infinitely expanding trousers. His shirt may rip, his shoes may split, but his nether portions remain tactfully housed in pants which defy the laws of physics as boldly as their owner, concealing from us the mystery of Hulk's great green dick. After Hulk changes back to Banner in one early scene, we glimpse him naked from behind, all his clothes presumably shredded, but later Hulk models a natty little purple drawstring number, halfway between swimming trunks and pedal-pushers, so maybe we are supposed to believe that someone has procured for him some super-stretchy fabrics. The effect is like seeing King Kong in a pair of giant Y-fronts. The other very odd thing is that Hulk does not look in the slightest bit scary. Lee intends him to be a metaphor for male rage and, in one scene, makes Sam Elliott give a very Hulky roar of frustration at the pointy-headed bureaucrats stopping him from doing his job. But Hulk himself looks often like a bloated green toddler awakened from his nap. He scowls, he smashes things up, he lashes around as if someone has incautiously fed him too much Coke and Smarties. Hulk is in dire need of some Ritalin or, failing that, a pretty good clip round the ear. What he gets is the poignant, emollient presence of Connelly who looks soulfully at him from whatever military helicopter has got up close while he is pushing over a building, and Hulk's face changes to that of an enormous green puppy. This is another film, like Black Hawk Down, which fails to harness the power and strength of Bana. We saw it in his breakthrough movie, the Australian black comedy Chopper, about the legendary violent prisoner Mark "Chopper" Read; there he really was a monster. I wouldn't back Hulk against Chopper in any straight fight. In any case, the movie can't make up its mind about Hulk's emerald rages. Are they simply something to be feared and detested: a hateful, Mr Hyde-type perversion of Banner's lovable Dr Jekyll? Or are they metaphorical expressions of a profound psychological pain and anger in all men, something in need not of repression, but understanding and catharsis? Added to this indecision is Lee's care to show us that Hulk, for all his terrible anger, never actually kills anyone. At two hours and 20 minutes, this is a long film, but Lee's Hulk is watchable and distinctive, and he persuades you to accept the idea of injecting this raunchy cartoon with artsy magic realism. Hulk's escape through the desert, filmed in long shot, leaping through the air, landing in the soft sand, rolling and tumbling through terrains of every sort, is playful and even whimsical. The special effects of Hulk's appearance may not themselves be staggering, but there's something intriguing about the compositions Lee invents for his fugitive.

This Hulk is no failure; more a highbrow curiosity in the company of zappy movie superheroes like Spider-Man, X-Men and Daredevil. In the end, Lee may be too much of a neophyte in the comic-book world: green, like his big, cross anti-hero.

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