Heart of Darkness is a chamber opera in one act by Tarik O'Regan, with an English-language libretto by artist Tom Phillips, based on the 1899 novella of the same name by Joseph Conrad.
Writer and broadcaster Tom Service has described the creators' approach as "mirroring the disproportionate power of Conrad's slender book."
[6] The opera opens with two snapshots: first Marlow, an old sea-captain, in a moment of recollection; next, a fragment of a mysterious encounter many years earlier, whose meaning only becomes clear at the end.
The action takes place concurrently on a ship, moored in the Thames Estuary, and, many years earlier, during Marlow's expedition to Central Africa.
He starts to relate the tale of his travels as a young man, when he sailed upriver in the equatorial forest of an unnamed country in Central Africa (which closely resembles the Congo Free State, a large area in Central Africa controlled by King Leopold II of Belgium from 1885-1908).
He has been sent there to find Kurtz, the enigmatic and once idealistic ivory trader rumoured to have turned his remote Inner Station into a barbaric fiefdom.
Marlow's journey starts in the Company's offices in Europe, where he is given his instructions and a perfunctory medical check, before he departs for Africa.
On board the steamboat Kurtz becomes delirious, reflecting incoherently on his imperious ideas and deeds as the boat sails away from the Inner Station.
His isolation from the truth of his actions and the atrocities witnessed - that "vast grave of unspeakable secrets" in which he speaks of being "buried" - is borne out in his epilogue: "we live, as we dream, alone".
Anna Picard described the opera as an "audacious, handsome debut"[7] in The Independent on Sunday and Stephen Pritchard, in The Observer, explained that "the brilliance of [the] opera lies in its ability to convey all that horror without the compulsion to show it – the ultimate psychodrama – and to employ music of startling beauty to tell such a brutal tale".
[14] Similarly, writing in The Guardian, George Hall thought "the score, though well managed, [didn't] fully seize its dramatic opportunities" but also commended the production as "swift and well paced, with no individual scene lasting longer than it should".
[15] An extensive online piece by Michael White in The Daily Telegraph described the opera as "a landmark" and O'Regan as "one of the great hopes for British music in the 21st century".