Welsh National Opera presents a new opera from acclaimed British composer Iain Bell, with a libretto by David Antrobus and Emma Jenkins that adapts David Jones’s epic poem set during the Battle of the Somme.
Private John Ball and his comrades in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers are posted to the Somme. In Mametz Wood they enter a strange realm – outside of time, dreamlike but deadly.
Rather than simply reporting the horrors of the Somme, In Parenthesis dares to offer hope. Even here among the destruction, a fragile flowering of regeneration and rebirth can be found. Bell’s beautiful score combines traditional Welsh song with moments of other-worldliness, terror, humour and transcendence.
