At the Royal Opera House, it's fair to assume, the route to the auditorium doesn't take patrons through a car park and past the dustbins. But then the opera is unlikely to have been written, scored and performed by novices aged between 11 and 17 in two and a half weeks.
The Savage, based on a book by the children's author David Almond, was set up by the Arcola theatre in north-east London as part of "Grimeborn", an annual experimental opera season that ends its third run next Saturday.
The challenge was at once simple and daunting: using as a base Almond's illustrated book about a young boy grieving for his father who creates a vicious imaginary alter ego after being bullied, the nine-strong cast would compose the music, write a libretto and then stage the piece. None of those involved, drawn mainly from the local neighbourhood of Dalston, had any operatic experience, and several had never before appeared on stage. The production was the brainchild of Alex Sutton, in charge of this year's Grimeborn, named as a playful dig towards the dinner jackets and picnics of Glyndebourne.
Intended as a mix of the arcane and accessible, this year's programme includes works by the likes of Handel, Harrison Birtwistle and Aaron Copland, although most are more experimental. It launched this week with a 15-minute mini-opera called Ride, a tango-scored love story involving a bike courier, a pedestrian and some busy traffic.
With The Savage, professionals were brought in to assist with the script, score and staging, but all the ideas came from the cast, Sutton said. "We're taking people from the local area who have never been in an opera, have no experience of this sort of music, let alone singing this sort of music, and then giving them three weeks to write an opera.
"It's been a really, really exciting process. I don't think a project like this has occurred before. There have been youth operas, but there's always been a composer writing the music and a librettist writing the words, and then the performers go away and learn the opera. This is totally different – they've done everything themselves. There had to be a structure, as they'd never done anything like this before, but essentially everything you see and hear is them."
The music, performed on the night by a professional string quartet, was composed using a computer programme made by the same US university team that helped create the video game Guitar Hero. It allows the non-trained to use a system of colours and lines that is translated into a score. "What the cast have come up with is incredibly complex new music, perhaps without realising it," Sutton said. "They all have very little experience of music. Most of them like urban pop, or hip-hop, but that's it."
The result, performed with verve and charisma, was probably not what a Glyndebourne-goer would call opera, with only brief snatches of singing amid a largely spoken, loosely versed libretto. The impressively modern-sounding, occasionally atonal music was additionally more a background mood emphasis than a driving force.
The piece could be best described as "contemporary music theatre", Sutton explained. "Although the cast were going for opera, what they've ended up with is, I suppose, music theatre in its purest form," he said.
The Arcola, a rambling former Victorian factory, has several performance spaces, including one accessed via a side passageway, where The Savage was performed. Among the audience was Almond, who remains best known for Skellig, a book previously adapted for television and – in a more traditional way – opera.
"We keep on saying all these things about young people all the time – kids don't read any more, kids aren't interested in art any more – but you've just got to talk to the ones involved in this opera," Almond said after meeting the cast.
They were not put off by the idea of opera. "One of the great things about young people is that they don't categorise things in the way adults do," he said. "They don't see opera as weird or off-putting. They just see it as a story set to music."
