Chamber Made have adapted Helen Garner's acclaimed novel, The Children's Bach into a contemporary opera. KAYE SERA speaks with the company's Artistic Director, Douglas Horton.

There is a real appetite for contemporary opera at the moment, isn't there?
It's excellent because it means that the scene is developing and there's an audience for it. It's still not like contemporary dance, where there are companies in every state, but the opera scene in Melbourne is huge.

Why do you think contemporary dance is more prolific than contemporary opera/theatre?
I don't know. Maybe people are still not sure what music theatre is in Australia. In Europe it's much bigger. Here people still tend to think of music theatre as either the Broadway musicals or big nineteenth-century opera. The idea of contemporary music theatre that lies outside those is still new. But it's growing.

The Children's Bach is based Helen Garner's novel. What can we expect?
It's about ordinary family life, but with people venturing outside of the family. There's this couple Dexter and Athena who have an autistic child who is driving them crazy. Dexter runs into an ex-girlfriend and Phillip, her boyfriend, and invites them around to dinner and Athena ends up having an affair with Phillip. So it's about relationships.

And the music is by Andrew Shultz - has Chamber Made commissioned this?
It's been two years in development. I remember reading The Children's Bach some time ago and I was struck by how sparse the writing is - there's no sentimentality. So Athena's foray outside of the family is done very matter-of-factly, there's nothing histrionic about it. It's all very deadpan and almost anti-opera, which makes it very interesting. Andrew's music is more like Baroque. He maintains an emotional lid on the action and it ends up more effective because of that.

So what might gay and lesbian folk get out of it?
Well, the values of relationships and sex are quite universal - you know, where those things go together and where they don't. And it's set in Northcote so it's inner-city.

Their neighbours are possibly lesbians...
Yeah that's true - it's not like Prahran. But what's interesting in this story is it's not the man that goes off and commits infidelity, it's the woman - and she does it in such a matter-of-fact way. And she realises very quickly that there's nothing exciting about it and returns.

Chamber Made presents
The Children's Bach
Malthouse Theatre
June 20 - July 5
www.malthousetheatre.com.au