The Hunger review: Donnacha Dennehy’s plotless opera set during the Famine

The Hunger is based on the writings of an American philanthropist who visited Ireland during the Famine. Photo: Pat Redmond

Abbey Theatre, Dublin
★ ★


At the top of a grassy hillside in 1840s Ireland, the American philanthropist Asenath Nicholson looks before her and tries to form a sentence: “I … I … I …”. These opening words of Donnacha Dennehy’s new opera, set during the Famine, sound like a humanitarian’s search for action. What can I do about it? 

That’s also an interesting question for artists in a decade when this traumatic event has rarely appeared onstage. How do you show something that could easily be overbearingly bleak? An extraordinary revival of Tom Murphy’s Famine proved that its gruelling drama can still swirl in mesmerising visuals. Moonfish Theatre’s Star of the Sea, adapted from Joseph O’Connor’s novel, also approached the catastrophe from an acute angle, through sombre stage effects and video art. By stylising such depressing material, there may be new ways of looking at it.

The Hunger is based on Asenath’s memoir and letters about her time in Ireland during the Famine. In Katherine Manley’s performance she is a sympathetic figure, observing a shuffling old man (Iarla Ó Lionáird) as he comes and goes. Each time he returns, someone from his family has starved to death. 

Directed by the opera’s producer Tom Creed, who co-produces with the Abbey Theatre, this looks as you’d expect. There’s a stretch of green countryside from a previous century dominating the stage. But it doesn’t sound as you might imagine. Dennehy’s music for the excellent Crash Ensemble players shivers through the structures of contemporary classical music, forming an elaborate accompaniment for Ó Lionáird’s sean-nós voice. The new meets the traditional. 

That feels like a decisive musical approach, but what’s less certain is the opera’s narrative direction. In her arias, Asenath dutifully emphasises all the miraculous displays of charity and hope. Ó Lionáird brings the required aching lament to the old man’s acceptance of his death. But the historical materials they're performing fit more as dispatches, and do little to bring the two characters together, leaving the opera plotless. 

Dennehy and dramaturg Jocelyn Clarke may well have suspected the thinness of the libretto. Also included in here are several video interviews with historians and economists. Noah Chomsky shows up to make anti-statist philosophy. The Famine gets framed as a sacrifice to sustain the British market system, and recent colonial history is exposed. These perspectives come in such multitude, it’s almost as if to distract from the opera’s lack of action. 

There is one word sung over and over, and which Jim Findlay’s stunning video display eventually centres on: Pity. An opera so well equipped with arguments might take that compassion and, like Asenath Nicholson, turn it into resolve. Instead, The Hunger hesitates on that important question. What can it do about it?  


Runs until Aug 24.