The Cricket Recovers

Music theatre performance The Cricket Recovers by Richard Ayres, Rozalie Hirs and Pierre Audi, performed at Holland Festival 2011.
A cricket with a depression and an elephant with an obsession, along with sixteen other characterful animals present hemselves in Pierre Audi’s new staging of Richard Ayers’ successful modern opera The Cricket Recovers. The libretto by Rozalie Hirs is based on Dutch writer Toon Tellegen’s award winning novel The recovery of the cricket. Through eighteen short scenes we follow the story of the cricket who suddenly feels a sadness that does not want to go away; and the elephant who has an uncontrollable urge to climb trees, but keeps falling out of them. In Ayres’ effervescent cocktail of
baroque gesture, late romantic rhetoric and dada-esque variety, the fantastic reality of these animals resonates as a
moving, intelligent expression of the human condition.