An opera might not be where you’d first expect to hear the long and distinctly nasal vowels of a strong Belfast accent. But even if you knew nothing else about Conor Mitchell’s Abomination, from the sound of the singers alone there’s only one place you could be. The same goes for the plot. The opera is a blistering, high-camp account of homophobia at the heart of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), centred on a 2008 Radio Ulster interview with DUP MP Iris Robinson the day after a gay man was attacked in Belfast. Homosexuality was shamefully wicked and vile, she said. It made her nauseous; it was an abomination. The libretto, also by Mitchell, sets Robinson’s words verbatim alongside those of her similar-minded colleagues and pours musical scorn on their prejudices. Performed by Mitchell’s own Belfast Ensemble, Abomination was a big critical success, drawing big audiences to a recent run in London, where I saw it at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, as well as in Dublin, Brighton and Belfast.
The uniquely Northern Irish scenario Mitchell skewers in hiswork to fruition. ‘Northern Ireland a weird place,’ Mitchell says from his home in Belfast. ‘Drive south for half an hour and you’re in an incredibly culturally vibrant country where they’ve really tied the arts to the economy and their national brand. Over the water, the rest of the UK seems pretty clear about what it is, too.’ He uses gay rights as an example: Britain had equal marriage and there was a gay Taoiseach in Dublin but people tolerated severe bigotry from politicians in the North. His response was to tackle it head on: ‘I always try to put a Northern Irish question at the centre of my work. The North runs through my music like a stick of rock.’
