Testament

What happens when your own memories become someone else’s story? 

Testament is an opera about memory, and about what happens when somebody else decides what your memories mean.

At its centre is Mary, the mother of Jesus. But she is not quite the Mary we know from paintings, churches or the Christian tradition. She is an old woman living in exile, remembering the events surrounding her son’s death. Her son’s murder, in fact. Around her are men who want her testimony. They are writing. They want to turn what happened into a coherent story.

Mary is not particularly interested in helping them.

The opera grew out of Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary, and Colm wrote the libretto himself. That distinction is important to me. I didn’t simply take his work and “adapt” it. We made the opera together, and in doing so we had to discover what this story could become when it moved from the private space of prose into the very public medium of opera.

What fascinated me was the distance between an event and the story eventually told about it.

We tend to think of memory as a kind of imperfect recording device. Something happens, we remember it, and gradually the picture becomes less accurate. But memory is much stranger than that. We constantly reconstruct the past. We reorder it. We attach significance to things that may not have seemed significant at the time. And other people’s versions of events begin to infiltrate our own.

That is particularly charged here because we know the enormous system of stories, images, rituals and beliefs that will be built around her son.

She doesn’t.

So Testament is not really an attempt to retell the Gospel story from Mary’s point of view. I think that would be much less interesting as a theatrical piece. It is about watching experience turn into narrative. Mary remembers particular people, smells, places, moments of terror and confusion. Paul, Marcus and John are trying to make those fragments mean something. They are creating a story that can travel beyond her.

That tension shapes the music and the staging too. There is no orchestra pit. The instrumentalists are visible and part of the dramatic world. Singers, actors and players form a single performing body, with individuals emerging from it to become particular people in Mary’s memory.

Past and present therefore don’t behave very politely. Characters appear and disappear. Memories interrupt one another. Something Mary recalls can suddenly become physically present around her.

For me, that is where opera becomes especially useful. Music is extremely good at allowing several versions of reality to exist simultaneously. Somebody can say one thing while the orchestra tells us something else. Five people can sing different words at once and we can understand, emotionally at least, that all five thoughts coexist.

And then there is Mary herself.

She is surrounded by people trying to find meaning in what happened. But she retains the right to say: that isn’t what I remember. Or: I was there. Or simply: no.

I suppose that is the central question of Testament. Who owns a story?

The person who lived it? The person who remembers it? The person who writes it down?

Or the people who come afterwards and believe it?

Ongoing thread. More from Tarik O'Regan to follow.

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