A review of Jennifer Walshe’s MARS opera at the Galway International Arts Festival (25 July 2025).

Oil spills as the ejaculate of God, birthing colonies on Mars, women without children being ‘virtualised’ so they are dead to everyone but themselves. These are some of the imaginings in Jennifer Walshe’s MARS, her first large-scale collaboration with Irish National Opera following the 2021 micro-opera Libris Solar and a range of other dramatic works. It is also the latest in a series of significant contemporary operas at the Galway International Arts Festival, following Donnacha Dennehy’s The Second Violinist (2017) and The First Child (2021) and Brian Irvine’s Least Like the Other (2019). 

Walshe has always explored the edges of our culture, whether it is the inanity of social media, the alternative humanism of AI, or fringe futurism, and in works such as The Site of an Investigation (2018) and Ireland: A Dataset (2020) she brilliantly reimagines these cultural cesspits as thrilling staged artworks. Yet since the pandemic, and the series of environmental and political reckonings that the world has faced, it feels like our planet is finally catching up on the composer’s imagination and we are now all living in a Walshe world. MARS, with a libretto by technology writer Mark O’Connell, stretches her canvas even further, exploring the interplanetary futurist hellscapes we are facing, if we can take it.

MARS tells the story of a voyage to the Red Planet on the Buckminster spaceship by four female astronauts. They are in a tight hexagonal space with all the paraphernalia of space travel: computers, headphones, microphones, sockets, buttons, swivelling blue chairs. Sally (Nina Guo), Valentina (Jade Phoenix), Judith (Sarah Richmond) and Svetlana (Doreen Curran) are initially optimistic and arrive centre-stage in a wave of 80s pop energy. They brief the audience on the kind of preparations and discipline necessary in order to take on the nine-month journey: mental health checks, exercise, and a sense of mission in ensuring humanity’s survival.

But gradually their lives become deadened by the mundane, such as empty voicemails from family, and they note how beautiful an oil spill is in the Gulf of Mexico (not Trump’s ‘Gulf of America’); they hear that the hundredth baby has been born on Mars to the new commune, but wonder what kind of life the child will have there. Their camaraderie is tested when they realise Judith has forgotten to bring the USB stick with the complete Criterion Collection films, and instead they are confined to Shrek the Third and the middle seasons of Real Housewives. This leads into a classic Walshe interlude when the four astronauts imagine becoming desperate housewives of Mars and what their new vacuous lives will be. The audience revel in it.

The voyage is also interrupted, however, by a communication from Axel Parchment, the leader of the commune on Mars. He announces new private ownership of the colony, and that they are now ‘free’, but it unnerves the astronauts, feeling that all is not what it seems. The first act closes just as they arrive on the planet. A key plot twist arrives in the second act, when they discover something pivotal about the planet and are faced with the opera’s key question: whether to allow this new colony to persist or not.

Quartets
Throughout the opera, eleven musicians conducted by Elaine Kelly sit raised on a stage behind the spaceship, obscured by a thin black curtain in the first half and red lighting in the second. Percussion, including the clang of a large heavy chain, brass, wind and a synthesiser (Máire Carroll) are key to the score, along with essential moments from violinist Larissa O’Grady. When the four astronauts sing together, Walshe sometimes scores a familiar wailing wave of vibrato, similar to how she vocalises when she performs her own works, and she also introduces the vocal glitching technique that is a feature of her solo performances. There are more melodic, beautiful quartets from the singers in both acts, with soprano Nina Guo coating the music in sweeping high notes.

MARS has many thematic strands running through it. Ideas are introduced and move on quickly. At the beginning it seems like we the audience are also on the journey, representing the colony, as the astronauts explain protocol to us, but this is soon left behind. It is text-heavy early on as Walshe and O’Connell introduce the miserable techno-utopian ideas of the broligarchy (leaving behind the ‘inefficiencies of democracy’), but this comes across as rather undeveloped Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, and I missed the quick-wittedness that normally characterises Walshe’s work. The spaceship too, rather than becoming a crucible for dramatic action, becomes a space that constricts and slows the narrative. The drama is immediately more engaging when they leave the ship and the characters split up. INO productions shine when there is a lot going on onstage for the audience to absorb, and to do away with that device leaves a considerable challenge for the opera that was not always met.

There were intense moments, such as when Sally receives a message saying she is being reassigned to the birthing colony and her disputations are painfully dismissed. Another scene enforces a ‘hustle-max!’ exercise routine and concludes with everyone  – even the musicians, including the conductor – screaming at those who can’t comply to ‘GO HOME! GO HOME!’ But although this was a high point, it felt like the opera needed more of this kind of intensity.

Despite my reservations, these were certainly not reflected amongst the full Leisureland audience, who jumped to their feet as soon as it was over for a long standing ovation, and many stayed for the post-show chat with composer and librettist. Undoubtedly, they welcomed the originality and creativity of Walshe and O’Connell, and co-director Tom Creed, the performances and movement from the singers, the brilliance of the band, and for anyone expecting an orthodox operatic work, MARS will surprise as Walshe always does. But if you are familiar with her previous original work, the opera may not have the same impact.

This is not to say that there isn’t a message within MARS trying to make its way out: our future is grim and the headlines suggest we have already lost, but the opera reminds us that the battle is not over. There will always be individual choices and, ultimately, they make the difference.

MARS will be performed at the Abbey Theatre for three nights on 7, 8 and 9 August. Visit www.irishnationalopera.ie.