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It's not often you hear language like drongo' and stick in up your arse' in an opera - but the all new Australian work Bliss isn't your usual opera.
Based on the 1981 Peter Carey novel of the same name, it tells the story of advertising executive Harry Joy who dies for nine minutes after a heart attack and wakes up in a living hell.
The Opera Australia production, by composer Brett Dean and librettist Amanda Holden, has been nine years in the making and will finally have its world premiere on Friday night at the Sydney Opera House.
Director Neil Armfield said it wouldn't be what fans of the novel, or indeed the 1985 film adaptation, might expect.
'They might think they know what to expect, but they'd probably be wrong,' Armfield told AAP.
'The work has found kind of a real poetic structure around the idea that this is a human being who has died and seen a vision of heaven and of hell, and suddenly sees the world in a totally new light.
'And his journey through this kind of mad carnival, which is Brisbane, Australia and the material world in the 1980s, leads him to finally find respite and peace in a vision of heaven on earth.'
Featuring cutting edge hi-tech stage design and Aussie accents and slang, it might also raise a few eyebrows among opera aficionados.
'It's probably the first opera that stick it up your arse' has been sung,' Armfield laughed.
Baritone Peter Coleman-Wright plays Joy and said it was exciting to take on a new character and make it his own.
'It's a great challenge and it's a great honour, and it's been thrilling and it's exhausting,' he said.
After playing in Sydney in March and Melbourne in April, the production will travel to the UK to play at the Edinburgh International Festival in August.
Coleman-Wright said it would show off a different side of Australian culture to the rest of the world.
'In a big world festival in Edinburgh there's something that's totally ours, that's not a sporting prowess or something, it's actually the flagship opera company, Neil Armfield's a great director, great cast, Peter Carey's novel and Brett Dean's written the score - all Australians,' he said.
'I don't think it's another excuse for put another prawn on the barbie' and all that sort of rubbish that people identify us with.
'I think they'll suddenly see that we have something else to say.'
A new production of Bliss has already been planned by the Hamburg State Opera in Germany later this year.
'It's great the work is already getting a second production because it means it's not just an anomaly, it's being created in other companies in other cultures,' Armfield said.
'It's new work that finally justifies the existence of the company because it means there's this wonderful contribution to the repertoire which is happening.'
