Burmese Days A chamber opera in twelve scenes after George Orwell

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Opera Prize 2027
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Burmese Days A chamber opera in twelve scenes after George Orwell © ©Francesco_Gioia i

A Europeans-only club in colonial Burma is ordered to admit one Burmese member: an Orwell-inspired chamber opera for five singers and eleven musicians, incorporating musical traditions of mainland Southeast Asia rarely heard in opera.

Presentation

Burmese Days is a chamber opera by composer Prach Boondiskulchok and librettist Sarah Howe, whose first collection, Loop of Jade, won the T. S. Eliot Prize. The opera is based on George Orwell’s 1934 debut novel. Distilled to retain the richness of Orwell’s story, it is written for five singers, a speaking role and an ensemble of eleven.
Orwell spent five years in the Imperial Police in Burma and wrote the novel from inside the system he attacked. In a small town in Upper Burma, a Europeans-only club is ordered to admit one Burmese member. U Po Kyin, a corrupt magistrate, wants the seat and engineers unrest he can then be seen to quell. His wife Ma Khin recruits May, singer and mistress of the English timber merchant Flory, to perform at the festival of the town spirit and rouse the crowd. Flory, who despises the Club yet depends on it, is courting Elizabeth, newly arrived from England. May’s song becomes political and a riot follows. Flory and U Po Kyin each claim credit. Weeks later, at Flory’s engagement party, May repeats the song she once sang to him privately; Elizabeth leaves him. The Club falls into decay, while Flory, as a ghost, imagines rebirth as trees for eternity. U Po Kyin takes over the Club and abuses its servant.
The score sets a European ensemble of eight alongside three musicians rooted in the hsaing waing and piphat traditions. Bangkok-born Boondiskulchok develops a compositional language drawing on their tuning systems and complexities alongside the full palette of contemporary classical music.
The staging blurs audience, pit and stage, making the opera house itself a space in which colonial fiction meets a postcolonial present.
Three years of collaborations and residencies have shaped the work, with innovation at its centre: a European ensemble adapting to a Southeast Asian musical system; roles crossing gender and ethnicity; resistance to literal ethnic casting; and a nuanced engagement with colonial history.