The space in which this new one–act opera takes place is astounding – a soaring cathedral nave deep inside the womb of a decommissioned printworks (formerly the home of Associated Newspapers). Numinously dark, its walls hung with vast rolls of white cloth and its floor strewn with shavings, this is the setting for Cave , the result of a collaboration between composer Tansy Davies, poet Nick Drake and director Lucy Bailey.
A portentous parable of the catastrophic mess we are wantonly making of our planet, it shows an unnamed man escaping from apocalyptic devastation into a cave which he has previously visited with his now-dead daughter. A cave is a place of echoes, and here the man imagines and...