The composers involved in the first two works brought to the stage by the Genesis Opera Project were more or less unknown quantities, but the third is by the Australian Jonathan Mills, whose chamber opera The Ghost Wife was included in the Bite season at the Barbican last November.
That was an effective piece of theatre, with some telling musical gestures and potent vocal lines; everything, in fact, that Mills's new Genesis opera, The Eternity Man, signally is not.
Mills has collaborated again with the poet Dorothy Porter to present this portrait of Arthur Stace, the born-again, homeless alcoholic who wandered the streets of Sydney in the middle of the last century writing the word "eternity" on the city's pavements.
Their opera provides a series of eight snapshots from Stace's life, tracing the path from the time before his religious conversion, when he worked in the city's red-light district, to his final moments on the cliffs overlooking Sydney harbour.
It's all over in just an hour, but seems far, far longer, mainly because the pacing is so uncertain. There are one or two passages of faster music, mainly confined to the instrumental episodes and containing some striking sonorities.
But the very measured, laboured delivery of the words (few of which are audible) and the rather unprepossessing ensemble writing - one particularly unfortunate scene is built upon the tune of Abide with Me - constantly hobble the drama, and never provide the variety and the moments of surprise the piece so desperately needs.
Even the intelligent singing of the baritone Richard Jackson, who has made something of a speciality of portraying anguished outsiders, cannot bring much presence to Stace's ramblings.
The other singers are a female trio (Tara Harrison, Claire McCaldin and Andee-Louise Hippolite) who spend most of their time as prostitutes but also function as an offstage chorus.
It is possible that a more prepossessing production than this one by Benedict Andrews might reveal another, more compelling dimension to The Eternity Man; somehow, though, I doubt it.
· Further performances tonight and tomorrow. Box office: 020-7288 4999.
