About the work
Opera (op. 129) in a prologue and main act by Peter Maxwell Davies to his own libretto, first performed on 18 September 1987 at the Staatstheater Darmstadt. Davies conceived the idea for the work as early as 1963 but spent more than two decades bringing it to completion.
Plot
At its centre is a figure embodied by a shop-window dummy, forced into conformity by the authority figures, advertising and television around it. In the main act, surgeons operate on the now-adult figure's brain, heart and genitals to correct its rebelliousness; once resurrected at giant size, it turns on the surgeons and the audience with a weapon that has become a machine gun.
Cultural significance
With the work, Davies settles accounts with social conformity and religious and political fanaticism, and observers have also read it in relation to the Thatcherism of the 1980s. Critics have described its deliberately garish, cartoonish exaggeration as an intentionally tasteless, violent morality tale.