Elsewhere - A New Opera by Michael Gallen

Cork Opera House, Emmet Place, Cork

Wed 17 Apr 2024 (note: this event has already taken place)
8pm
€20.00

Following its hugely successful run on the Abbey Theatre stage in 2021, this bold new opera by Michael Gallen, based on the true story of the radical “Monaghan Asylum Soviet” of 1919”, is coming to Cork Opera House as part of a national tour.  Highlighted as one of the Irish Times’s Best of 2021, Elsewhere was also nominated for two Irish Times Theatre Awards, including Best Opera.
In 1919, the staff of the Monaghan Asylum barricaded the hospital gates and declared themselves an independent Soviet commune. Their strike brought asylum workers and patients together in collective action, presenting a revolutionary vision of what a care-centred society could look like. The moment of the Soviet is in constellation with our own, occurring during the 1918 Flu pandemic, and at a time when social and geographical borders were being redrawn. Marked by death and hardship, the strikers overcame sectarian divides to demand humane conditions and equal pay for women and men.
In Elsewhere, these events unfold through the visions of Celine, a patient who decades later remains ‘locked in’ to the