Deptford may not be the obvious choice when planning a summer holiday, especially if you’re into chilling on a beach. Yet, here they are, twenty or so people in swimsuits reclining on the sands in south London with seemingly few cares in the world.

The beach, however, is not what it seems. It’s an operatic landscape, filling The Albany performance space and acting as stage for the assorted characters and equipment of a seaside afternoon. There are children kicking a beachball around with occasional admonishment from their mother, an owner training her dog, a younger group playing badminton, studious twins reading literature, a retiree couple carefully topping up sunscreen, two young gay men idly caressing one another’s hands.


This is Sun & Sea, an unexpected opera created by composer Lina Lapelytė and librettist Vaiva Grainytė with director Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė. Together, they created it as the Lithuanian work in 2019’s Venice Biennale of Art, where it won the top award – the Golden Lion – leading to critical appreciation and now a tour. That tour has taken the project across the USA, Germany, Greece, Norway, Switzerland, and now into the UK.

The retired lady rolls over, turning to her husband telling him, “I bought us some new sunscreen,” then fumbling for glasses, reads the instructions:




One of the romantic gays recalls, in song, how he met the person in his hand:



One by one, various beachgoers intone personal stories related to where they are or how they came to be there. The one-half of the Volcano Couple’s story relates to the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull volcanic eruption in Iceland which grounded Europe’s aeroplanes, and how if it wasn’t for that environmental interruption his life, totally elsewhere, wouldn’t have been changed for the better.

A man reveals himself as a philosopher, and considers the impact of unseasonal, ungeographical food being shipped around the world on a whim. A woman complains about the rubbish others leave behind. A woman tells us about the tragic drowning of her ex-husband, wondering if a magnesium deficiency led to cramp and descent into the depths.

The twins lay alongside one another – one deeply reading Ten, kur gieda vėžiai, the Lithuanian translation of Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing. They have the future on their minds, imagining a near-time when corals have gone, and mankind has started to 3D print a new ecology:




As they reveal, all the stories connect to landscape, environment, and ecology. A wealthy mum tells us that they plan to take their sun to see the Great Barrier Reef for his 10th birthday, in a year and a half. He has already swum in the Black, Yellow, White, Red, Mediterranean, and Agean seas and two of the world’s oceans, with the others on this year’s itinerary.

Her child is one of the two kicking the beachball around the beach/stage. Imprinted onto the ball is the globe, on occasions he and his brother kick it with a similar abandonment as his mother does to the ecological impact of luxury travel, and with an energy almost breaking the fourth wall as the ball nearly hits the audience looking down from above.



The architecture of the theatre works perfectly for Sun & Sea, the shallow balcony surrounding the performance space offers the experience a sense of both being immediately present in the beach dramas, yet also remaining at a floating god-like distance. This marries our relationship to the intertwined stories, here presented for our entertained gaze but also natural and global predicaments we are intrinsically involved with. We are the people on the beach.

The Albany, in its current form, was opened in 1982 after the more historic Albany Empire burnt down following suspected arson. Designed by John Partridge of Howell Killick Partridge & Amis – most well known for the Alton West housing estate – it was a theatre for a new age of culture, an open-plan space with circular balcony level lending itself to a variety of artforms and possible configurations.



The work was inspired by architecture, and so perhaps it’s fitting that it is so situated into each space it’s presented. The artists have spoken of how a visit to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim in New York started a conversation in which they imagined the audience watching a ground-level performance from the spiralling ramp. Originally presented at the Lithuanian National Museum of Art in 2017, it was translated into English for the 2019 Venice Biennale, installed within the historic Marina Militare.


When presented in Los Angeles, a scaffold tower was constructed to form the top-down in-the-round vantage required, but in Deptford it almost feels as if the opera was designed to suit the theatre architecture, fitting as neatly as the Venice production – it can be a joy when an artistic production dovetails so neatly with the space it’s presented within.

Recently, the Albany has been refurbished by Witherford Watson Mann Architects as part of a wider masterplan for the site (see HERE) which will enable the theatre to ensure a financially and culturally sustainable future (see HERE). Perhaps Sun & Sea, a work about the place as much as the beauty of the opera and importance of the ecological connectivity within the libretto, will help raise funds for the architectural project.