The Sleeper, Welsh National Youth Opera, Cardiff

Excellent new opera about insomnia doesn't need trendy promenade nuisance

by Stephen WalshFriday, 15 July 2011

The Sleeper and her insomniac fellow squatters in Stephen Deazley's new operaImages © Kirsten McTernan

“These premises have 24-hour security surveillance,” reads one of the notices on the wall as we audience traipsed round the outside of Cardiff’s Coal Exchange between stages of this mobile production of Stephen Deazley’s new opera about people who can’t sleep. It turned out to be the only poster that had nothing to do with the performance, in among the “Nobody Sleeps” signs, the “Keep Awake”s, the “No Beds” (or whatever: “Nessun dorma” I didn’t see or hear, but might have done; it would have been thematic and does in fact crop up in the libretto).

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