• Jennifer Walshe & Mark O'Connell
  • July - August 2025
  • Galway & Dublin

MARS

Four astronauts and an AI software interface are cooped up in the cabin of a space-craft for nine months on a mission to Mars.

★★★★★ "Jennifer Walshe’s new work, created with Mark O’Connell, is like nothing else Irish National Opera has staged." The Irish Times

As they journey across the vast abyss of space, tensions rise, relationships are tested, seasons of Real Housewives are watched and re-watched. Arriving on the red planet, they confront isolation, sinister ideologies, the prospect of alien life, and a vibe-shift toward corporate authoritarianism. MARS is an opera about space colonisation, reactionary futurism, pronatalism, the madness of hustle culture, and the unsettling futures encroaching on our present.

Please note that this production contains strobe lighting, haze effects and periods of loud noise.

Co-produced with Opéra de Lille.
Commissioned by Irish National Opera, Muziekgebouw Amsterdam, Klangforum Wien and Opéra de Lille.

Join the conversation online with #MARS

“The most original compositional voice to emerge from Ireland in the past 20 years.” - The Irish Times on Jennifer Walshe

Cast & Creative Team

Cast

Sally  Nina Guo
Valentina Jade Phoenix
Judith Sarah Richmond
Svetlana Doreen Curran
Irish National Opera Orchestra

Creative Team

Conductor                           Elaine Kelly
Co-Directors                  Tom Creed & Jennifer Walshe
Set & Lighting Design Aedín Cosgrove
Costume Design Catherine Fay
Video Design Conan McIvor
Sound Designer   Úna Monaghan
Movement Director   Bryan Burroughs
Répétiteur Aoife Moran

Discover More

MARS | Trailer

MARS | In rehearsals

Credits

Jennifer Walshe would like to acknowledge the below for their support on MARS:

Thanks to Melbourne Electronic Sound Studios for access to various historical synthesizers including the Polivoks. 

Recording of Jovian whistlers made by Voyager 1 courtesy of NASA and The University of Iowa. Recording of whistlers detected by the Van Allen Probes EMFISIS Waves instruments courtesy of NASA and The University of Iowa. https://space-audio.org/ License: Attribution 4.0 International.

Audio from reentry video as Orion returns from Artemis I courtesy of NASA. Kepler: Star KIC12268220C Light Curve Waves to Sound, Kepler: Star KIC7671081B Light Curve Waves to Sound, First Audio Recording of Sounds on Mars and NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter in Flight courtesy of NASA. Sounds of Perseverance Mars Rover Driving – Sol 16 courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech. License: Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported.

Acoustics Diagnostic Experiment, ISS Alarms and ISS module interior sounds courtesy of European Space Agency. License: Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 IGO.

Sonifications of magnetic field variations from the THEMIS satellite courtesy of the Heliophysics Audified: Resonances in Physics (HARP) project, supported by NASA under award 80NSSC21K0796. 

dubstep1 150BPM Fmin by Jghoffman418 -- https://freesound.org/s/711350/ -- License: Attribution 4.0

Archival footage supplied by Internet Archive (at archive.org) in association with Prelinger Archives

Massive thanks to Mark Knoop, Emily Moore and Ragnar Árni Ólaffson.

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