After a crash course in opera, I’m beginning to feel like I may actually know a thing or two about the art form. Which is why I was excited to spread my wings and chat with local company Nuova Vocal Arts about its newly commissioned operatic version of Silence.
Silence is a modern, ambitious adaptation of a play written 25 years ago, and after four years of securing rights, composing music and putting it all together, Nuova founder and director Kim Mattice Wanat has her opera.
Silence is based on U.K. playwright Moira Buffini’s 1999 work of the same name — inspired by Dark Ages England but infused with anxieties of the New Millennium. The play follows Lord Silence of Cumbria, who’s forced to marry a fiery French noblewoman, Ymma of Normandy. The two uncover a shocking secret that sends them fleeing across the countryside on a journey of survival and self-discovery.
“I did this play as my thesis at the U of A and fell in love with it,” Mattice Wanat explains. “When I first contacted [Buffini] to ask if I could turn Silence into an opera she said, ‘it may not be my best play, but it’s definitely my favourite play,’ and she thought ‘I can really see how Silence can become an opera.’”
All of the characters, including the not-so-pure maiden, the not-so-manly lord, a not-so-celibate priest and not-so-insensitive thug, as Goodreads describes them, all serve a king who won’t get out of bed. It grapples with themes of gender, power, patriarchy, religion and identity. The show’s synopsis puts it bluntly: “Nothing you do matters, the world keeps getting worse … or does it?”
“It’s super epic. It really is about a very weak human being of a king, whose fear moves into a dominant need for power. So you can imagine that right now we’re living that reality,” Mattice Wanat says, referring to the current political climate in the United States under the second Trump administration.
“What’s so great about this story is that it feels historical, but it immediately renders parallelism to our lives.”
The team at Nuova preserved the spirit of the original play while exploring what opera can uniquely bring to the table. The score, composed by Leslie Uyeda with libretto by Darrin Hagen, took a year to complete, followed by an additional six months dedicated to orchestration. Mattice Wanat describes it as feeling more like a film score than a traditional opera — fast-paced, full of quick scene changes and emotional depth.
This production moves constantly and is rich in character development. It’s performed in English and moves fast enough to keep even a 12-year-old engaged. That’s intentional. Mattice Wanat wants to break down the idea that opera is intimidating, expensive or hard to follow.
To make this production even more accessible, Nuova Vocal Arts is offering a pay-what-you-can night on Monday, plus buy-one-get-one tickets on Tuesday and Thursday. With Silence, they’re looking to prove that opera isn’t just still relevant — it’s very much alive.
Silence runs June 21 to 27 at The Orange Hub Theatre.
