Dust Song doesn’t give a great first impression. Whoever wrote the camdram blurb should consider turning down their ponce dial: “past and present blur and the boundary between the spoken and the sung collapses.” However, Dust Song doesn’t just talk the talk. A collaboration between veteran virtuosos Joe Bates and Ceci Mourkogiannis, the show takes an innovative format, attempting to fuse dialogue and opera. Whether it always succeeds in doing so is questionable, but such an ambitious undertaking ought itself be lauded.

We are welcomed by a domestic wasteland of white dust-sheets covering indistinct items of furniture. At first I am unsure whether the sounds coming from the pit are the musicians tuning up, or an overture. This discordance, though perhaps not easy on the ear, demands that you listen, and creates a sense of underlying unease. There is something oddly refreshing about the lack of noise coming from the stage itself, as siblings Abby (Camilla Seale) and Sam (Nils Greenhow) enter virtually unannounced and begin to quietly go through what are, it emerges, the belongings of their deceased father.

The initial dialogue is somewhat wooden, Seale slightly too pleading for Greenhow’s more understated grief. However, when the pair make the brave leap into opera, they seem to limber up. Bates’ disconcerting yet affectively in-tune polyphony (a particular highlight was Jonathan Coote’s electric guitar) bridges greater narrative leaps than regular drama would allow, as we move fluidly from the dead father’s house to childhood memories. Such transitions were eased by Fred Maynard and Mourkogiannis’ decision to keep the whole cast onstage for the entirety of the performance, which created an intense closeness, a proximity which only a family can share.

The emotional trajectory of the play is rushed. It seems as though we have barely sat down before the play has reached fever pitch, a climax it exhaustingly sustains for the final twenty minutes. By this point, most of the dialogue is song, making the plot itself hard to follow. Mourkogiannis does not help this by often having characters interrupt or talk over one another, which is intelligible when spoken, but less so when sung. By attempting (albeit impressively) to weave the nuances of ordinary drama into the operatic, the show occasionally overreaches itself, leaving its audience overwhelmed by sheer sound.

In its attempt to create a working dramatic-operatic hybrid, Dust Song is still finding its feet. However, I’ve never seen anything of the sort in Cambridge, and this is a bold first attempt. Though less would perhaps have been more with the music, I thoroughly enjoyed this intrusion of song into speech, and felt it both matched and enhanced the play’s emotional landscape. There will inevitably be some collateral damage in the clash of two such titanic genres, though the combination ultimately bore fruit.