OzOpera is the touring arm of Opera Australia. It was set up to present chamber-sized pieces in reasonably portable productions, and it commissions new works assiduously; its nearest British equivalent would be Music Theatre Wales. For its British debut under the banner of the Barbican's BITE season the company has brought over Jonathan Mills and Dorothy Porter's The Ghost Wife, a tight and effective one-act three-hander, premiered in Melbourne three years ago.
Porter's libretto, based upon a short story by Barbara Baynton, is a depressing little tale of life in the Australian bush at the turn of the 20th century. A woman is trapped in a loveless marriage to a feckless sheep-shearer and marooned in a wooden shack miles from anywhere. Alone with her baby, she fears everything around her - nature, darkness, ghosts - and her terror takes real form with the arrival of a swagman, who threatens her but then disappears, only to return that night to rape and murder her. When her husband returns drunk to find the hut empty but for the baby in its basket, he thinks he has been deserted, but his wife appears as a ghost, promising to haunt him for the rest of his life.
The message - men are violent, untrustworthy, women their obligatory victims - may be wearisomely PC, but the text is spare and unobtrusively poetic, and the dramatic pacing sure. Mills sets the words in a slightly anonymous vocal style with echoes of Britten and Tippett, and a fondness for elaborate melismas, but the words come across easily enough. The instrumental accompaniment - eight players behind the scenes, and two percussionists on either side of the acting area - is spare, often pared down to a single line. It is short on memorable musical ideas but strong on atmosphere, and the percussionists take a dramatic as well as musical role, playing wooden panels and metal bars embedded in the set and then attacking the slats of the wooden shack itself in the build-up to the climactic rape.
The result is a powerfully effective piece of theatre, which just goes off the boil in the final scene, when the appearance of the woman as ghost is a bit too hammily managed. That is the only miscalculation in Adam Cook's production, which obtains intense performances from the three characters - Grant Smith as the bullying husband, Kanen Breen as the predatory swagman and Dimity Shepherd as the woman. Shepherd is absolutely compelling: her two long scenas are the musical and dramatic core of the piece, and she sustains both superbly.
· Until November 23. Box office: 020-7638 8891.
