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The Surgery at Styx Creek (Opera, 2019)
This article concerns the 2019 Newcastle opera by ██ . For the location in the novel, see Styx Creek.
For critical discussion of how this production staged intimacy and consent, see Surgical Intimacy and the Staging of Care.
The Surgery at Styx Creek is a chamber opera premiered at the Newcastle Playhouse in October 2019. It is a distinctly Australian treatment, condensing the novel's second half into a two-act work centred on Styx Creek—the watering hole where Leif and Katita encounter the crocodiles and the drone's instant photographs.
The opera is formally notable for its refusal of grand romantic register. Rather than a soaring love duet, the composer has written the Leif and Katita embrace (Act II, scene 3) as a sequence of overlapping silences—both singers breathing in unison with the orchestra's bass frequencies, their voices entering and departing without melodic resolution. One critic described it as "the wound that does not close into song."[1] The intimacy is staged through breath and pressure rather than lyrical effusion.
Production and staging
The original production, directed by ██ , set the work in a semi-abstract interior: the crocodile pool rendered as dark water upstage, with Leif and Katita moving through suspended corroded metal and red earth. The Mechanic appeared as a baritone chorus, multiplying across the stage, embodying the ten layered versions. The design emphasised the interior as architectural cage, the cycle as a room without exits.
Critically, the production divided audiences. Feminist and queer critics praised the refusal of romantic closure; disability-representation scholars noted the sensitive staging of Leif's blindness and lameness without infantilisation.[citation needed] Conservative reviewers found the work austere, "dramatically inert," lacking emotional arc. A handful of religious groups in NSW objected to what they perceived as sexual content in the Act II embrace, though the music contains no explicit gesture—the controversy itself became part of the work's reception history.[citation needed]
Critical reception: The consent question
The critical focus rapidly centred on the question of erotics and consent. The composer's choice to leave Katita's response to Leif's twelve-word question silent—she opens her mouth; no sound emerges; the orchestra swells into darkness—provoked intense scholarly debate. Does her silence represent refusal, acceptance, or the glitch itself rendered as music?
Dr. ██ , writing in Adaptations and Impossibility (2020), argued the opera stages the consent question not as resolvable but as generative—that Katita's silence is neither "yes" nor "no" but the space in which the cycle's ethics become visible. By contrast, Dr. ██ (2021) read the silence as erasure of Katita's agency, arguing the opera replicates the problem it should critique.[2]].]
The work has been performed three times since the premiere, with significant cast and directorial changes. A 2022 revival at Melbourne emphasised the suburban uncanny reading, staging much of Act I in a deteriorating suburban kitchen. A 2023 concert performance at the Sydney Opera House, conducted by ██ , foregrounded the instrumental and vocal colour, diminishing the stage action almost entirely.
Music and form
The orchestration—strings, two woodwinds, brass, and substantial corrugated-cardboard percussion—reflects the Dampened Cardboard tradition rooted in Smith's Newcastle. The composer employs maqam intervals and microtonal inflection in Katita's vocal line, particularly in the Act II solo where she addresses the drone's photographs, creating an unsettled tonal space that mirrors Leif's optical instability.
The work concludes not with the wings and crash (as the novel does) but with Katita and Leif alone at Styx Creek, the orchestra fading into the sound of the Kármán line's low drone. No resolution; no final embrace. The lights fade before the water. This ending—hopeful, uncertain, geometrically incomplete—has become iconic in discussion of how different adaptations approach the glitch.
See also
- A Complicated Surgery Will Take Place on the Beach Tonight (opera adaptations)
- Styx Creek
- The Consent of the Cycle
- Surgical Intimacy and the Staging of Care
- Australian theatre and Beach Surgery
References
- ↑ ██ , The Sydney Review, Dec 2019.
- ↑ Both essays cited in [[The Consent of the Cycle