However, their attempts to achieve a more peaceful resolution to their lives (in the face of a brutal and cynical war campaign involving the President of the United States of America and her Director of CIA) result in them becoming further—and fatally—entangled in the conflict when Mohammed takes the fatal step of "saving" Leila by turning her over to American forces, leading to her internment and subsequent death in Camp X-Ray.
The plot is resolved when Mohammed retrieves the dead Leila's poetry as a completed libretto, which he brings back to Daniel to set to music (effecting a symbolic reconciliation between Jewish and Palestinian cultures in spite of realpolitik interests and personal tragedy).
[5] In late 2002, the post was filled by controversial Welsh playwright Dic Edwards, and the two subsequently wrote Manifest Destiny together, completing the opera in 2003.
Taking as its starting point the most ardent form of contemporary violence—that of the suicide bomber—it asks us to contemplate a path, a journey of the soul, on which these 'martyrs' are transformed by the power of love.
"[1] In interviews with Reuters, Edwards has stated "I've always believed theatre is a place of debate... What we wanted to show is that terrorists are human beings, with the same emotions as the rest of us.
"[7] In an article written for The Scotsman, Burstein stated"(Manifest Destiny) imagines a scenario in which the protagonists – would-be suicide bombers – are stopped in their tracks.
"[8] A promenade production of the first act of Manifest Destiny was performed at the Cockpit Theatre, Marylebone, London during November 2003, directed by David Wybrow.
The second full-length production (also directed by David Wybrow) was staged at the St Georges West venue between 6 and 29 August 2005 as part of the 2005 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, with a cast of four.
The various productions gained a great deal of press attention, much of it relating to the subject matter, including coverage by Reuters, the BBC and Sud Deutsche Zeitung.
For the 2003 Tricycle Theatre production, the Observer's Anthony Holden described Manifest Destiny as a "worthy piece" but also commented that "for all its static, repetitive atmospherics, Burstein's melodic, neo-classical score – the tango for torture, a waltz for the White House – is badly let down by Dic Edwards's libretto, which ranges from the crudest anti-American satire to the most banal, platitudinous failure to explain the appeal of politico-religious duty (i.e. suicide bombing) over love.
"[13] The Daily Telegraph's David Gritten described the opera as "rigorous and high minded, with a story in the environs of Greek tragedy" and praised Burstein's ambition and the music (which the reviewer found "mournful" and "affecting"), but attacked Edwards' libretto as "stilted" and the political content as "banal and fatally one-sided,"[14] In a combined feature/review of political works at the 2005 Fringe, the Sunday Herald's Iain McWhirter hailed Manifest Destiny as a "scintillating if flawed opera – with a witty and surprisingly melodic neo-classical score" but argued that "the politics are sometimes risible (and) the ultimate message, that love can triumph over religion and bring Jew and Muslim together, is unconvincing.
"[15][better source needed] Anna Picard, in The Independent on Sunday, was particularly dismissive of Manifest Destiny, describing it as "sixth-form satire", and attacking the music for "the abject narrowness of its harmonic language and the robotic word-setting."
Although she praised the cast for their performances, she described to the opera overall as "a trite affair", the music as "uninspiring, save for the odd duet" and to the libretto as "horribly leaden and unmusical".
Lee concluded her review with the comment "I found the tone depressingly anti-American, and the idea that there is anything heroic about suicide bombers is, frankly, a grievous insult.
[18] The court case and its aftermath inspired a subsequent theatrical play, The Trainer, written by David Wilson and Anne Aylor (with co-writes by Burstein).
Premiered at Oxford House, London, in March 2009, the play covered a fictionalised version of the events of the trial, in parallel with a separate plot strand similar to one used in Manifest Destiny.
From this, she has moved into a form of militant Islamism: to this end, she has established links with a suicide bomb cell in Jerusalem run by her friends Omah and Mohammed.
I don't think we can allow ourselves to see Islamic fundamentalists simply as enemies… An opera can penetrate contemporary events emotionally and lay bare the motives of the characters with absolute clarity.
(Aria: "For a century Western nations have brought terror to Arabia") In their separate worlds, Daniel, Leila, Mohammed and the CIA Man muse on the situation (Quartet: "Parallels").
Scene 3 – The White House, Washington DC The President expresses misgivings about attacking Arabian states, and fears "as a mother" for "the children of Arabia."
Mohammed's true motive for travelling to Guantanamo, however, is to seek redemption and forgiveness from Leila, who has been captured by the Americans on his information and is now imprisoned in Camp X-Ray.
But all that seemed important to me was to look straight into the heart of darkness and, like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat, to pull out light… My motive began as outrage, to tell the truth our Western governments were not telling us... And yet, even as these concerns formed the structure of our plot, so that outline was filled in by something else unexpectedly: by interweaving love stories, by a sacrament of compassion and divine forgiveness falling across all who strayed along this fateful path."
The 2003, 2004 and 2005 productions featured music provided entirely by voices and solo piano (played by Burstein himself).The 2005 Edinburgh Festival Fringe production also utilised a fragment of rock music – an excerpt of the song Telescopic by the British band Suns Of The Tundra[1] (this was inserted at the start of the prison sequence to represent the use of sonic psychological warfare by the US Army, and is not considered to be part of the score itself).
The opera utilizes a wide variety of theatrical techniques and approaches including tragedy, black comedy, satire, sections which can be played as dream sequences, agit-prop, expressionism, and parallel scenes.
At the time of the Edinburgh production, director David Wybrow described Manifest Destiny as "opera-noir: a new melodramatic theatre that reaches for the emotional intensity of opera in order to take on the profoundly disorientating anxieties of the twenty-first century.
"(Manifest Destiny is partially inspired by) the breakdown of accepted divisions and barriers, where global phenomena such as AIDS, accelerated ecological change, urban poverty and uncontained war threaten us with their ability to cross boundaries and sweep away the safe space of individual difference.
(It) suggests that in these fluid circumstances, no-one can any longer afford to mistake ideology for truth: that totalizing and exclusive world-views of all kinds are obsolete and dangerous, and that the intellectual survival-strategies of powerful vested interests must give way before the imperative for new kinds of human relationship... Whatever the purpose of terrorism is thought to be, its limits as a weapon of propaganda lie in its tendency to draw attention only to itself, rather than the issues under protest.
Mr Director of CIA is portrayed as a brutal Machiavellian committed to the concept of the New American Century and using a mixture of temptation, moral seduction and bullying to achieve his ends.
When written in 2002, the opera contained two sequences featuring abuse of a Muslim prisoner by an American guard (one set in Afghanistan and the other in Guantánamo Bay detention camp).
In an article written for The Guardian, Burstein reflected: "Dic had uncanny foresight in 2003, when he wrote Manifest Destiny’s torture scenes in Afghanistan and Guantanamo with sexual abuse against detainees – long before the full news broke.