THERE could have been few leaving Donnacha Dennehy’s opera without some feeling of relief.

This is not to castigate this 80-minute treatment of the isolation and despair at the heart of a society that ignores the pain of so many, or the cruelly insistent music. Both the composer and writer-director Enda Walsh would surely have wished to register this impact on their audiences in the work.

It’s set in a seedy hotel inhabited by three disparate souls — a dysfunctional couple who have arranged to meet a lone Irish woman to help her commit suicide and a manic caretaker who would lend a comic element to the proceedings if he didn’t embody a sense of knowing menace.

We’re introduced to the prison of their lives as the husband conducts his ghastly business in order to fulfil his empty dream of building an extension to his house, his loveless wife just longs agonisingly to be kissed, while their “customer” seeks escape from her own self-obsessed personality.

The two women make fitful attempts to relate and the caretaker seizes the opportunity to seduce the loveless wife while her husband enjoys a lone karaoke session aggressively expressing his macho dreams. There are one or two moments of lyrical beauty which serve to emphasise the pervasively anxious and threatening music which must have been as demanding to play for the aptly named Crash Ensemble as for Claudia Boyle, Robin Adams and Katherine Manley to sing.

While The Last Hotel is not entertaining in a pleasurable sense it is certainly thought-provoking and a bold attempt to hold a mirror up to a social illness we largely choose to ignore.

Review by Gordon Parsons