Between Worlds: Opera in 11 Scenes, Libretto

by Nick Drake

Between Worlds, the highly anticipated operatic debut from Tansy Davies to a libretto by Nick Drake, opened at London's Barbican Theatre on April 11, 2015. A bold and highly individual response to the events of 9/11, the opera---commissioned by English National Opera---brings Davies and Drake together with acclaimed director Deborah Warner. A disparate group of individuals is trapped high up in one of the Twin Towers, caught between earth and heaven, life and death. As the work progresses it opens out to a universal panorama of human beings in extremis. Drake's libretto deftly weaves together a wide variety of texts, from actual communications sent on the morning of 9/11 to passages from the Latin Requiem Mass.

48 pages, Paperback

First published September 14, 2015

About the author

Nick Drake was born in 1961. He lives and works in London. His first book-length collection, The Man in the White Suit (Bloodaxe Books, 1999), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 1999, and was selected for the Next Generation Poets promotion in 2004. From The Word Go was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2007. His most recent projects include a stage adaptation of Philippe Petit’s To Reach the Cloud; the screenplay for the Australian film Romulus, My Father, starring Eric Bana, which won Best Film at the Australian Film Awards; Success, a play for the National Theatre's Connections project; and a trilogy of historical novels (Nefertiti, shortlisted for CWA Best Historical Crime Novel, Tutankhamun and Egypt: The Book of Chaos which Mammoth Screen are developing for TV). He is a screenwriter, and is also working the composer Tansy Davies and director Deborah Warner on an opera for ENO. In September 2010 he was invited to join Cape Farewell's trip to the Arctic to explore climate change, and from that journey arose a commission from United Visual Artists to create poems and texts for their ground-breaking installation High Arctic at the National Maritime Museum (2011). Those poems, together with others inspired by the Arctic and its voices, are gathered in his collection The Farewell Glacier (Bloodaxe Books, 2012).