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- Manifest Destiny is an opera composed by Keith Burstein with an English libretto by Dic Edwards. The opera is notable for dealing with the subject of Islamic suicide bombers, and with the ramifications of both the Middle Eastern conflict and the War on Terror. Set in the present day or "near-future", the complex plot centres on a harrowing journey through the War on Terror by the Palestinian poet Leila who—along with her friend Mohammed—is radicalised and drawn into a suicide bomber cell, leaving her lover (the Jewish composer Daniel) in a state of hysterical blindness due to his despair at her loss and at the state of the world. Leila and Mohammed subsequently undergo a profound change of heart and, on the eve of their suicide mission, renounce violence and reject their own bombs. However, their attempts to achieve a more peaceful resolution to their lives (in the face of a brutal and cynical war campaign involving the President of the United States of America and her Director of CIA) result in them becoming further—and fatally—entangled in the conflict when Mohammed takes the fatal step of "saving" Leila by turning her over to American forces, leading to her internment and subsequent death in Camp X-Ray. The plot is resolved when Mohammed retrieves the dead Leila's poetry as a completed libretto, which he brings back to Daniel to set to music (effecting a symbolic reconciliation between Jewish and Palestinian cultures in spite of realpolitik interests and personal tragedy). Manifest Destiny has attracted a large amount of press attention due to its themes, content and subject matter—including scenes showing the preparations for a suicide bomb raid and the incarceration and maltreatment of Leila in Camp X-Ray (the latter of which was a scene written prior to public knowledge of the events at Abu-Ghraib). An accusation in the press was the subject of a libel action (Burstein vs Associated Newspapers) in the British High Court. The opera has been staged twice: once at London's Tricycle Theatre in 2004 and once at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2005. Six years after the Edinburgh performances, the opera was extensively rewritten and restaged in London as Manifest Destiny 2011. (en)
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- 42390 (xsd:nonNegativeInteger)
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- Tricycle Theatre, London (en)
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- 0001-09-11 (xsd:gMonthDay)
- "Our starting point was: where do suicide bombers come from? They don't just drop from the sky. This whole thing goes back way before 9/11; the jihad began in Afghanistan with the Russian invasion and then it was carried on with the Americans in Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War. To say they are mindless people is not addressing the problem. To be a suicide bomber is an act of despair; there's nothing more useless or hopeless." (en)
- " the breakdown of accepted divisions and barriers, where global phenomena such as AIDS, accelerated ecological change, urban poverty and uncontained war threaten us with their ability to cross boundaries and sweep away the safe space of individual difference. suggests that in these fluid circumstances, no-one can any longer afford to mistake ideology for truth: that totalizing and exclusive world-views of all kinds are obsolete and dangerous, and that the intellectual survival-strategies of powerful vested interests must give way before the imperative for new kinds of human relationship... Whatever the purpose of terrorism is thought to be, its limits as a weapon of propaganda lie in its tendency to draw attention only to itself, rather than the issues under protest. The moral and intellectual tunnel vision this induces, as the world’s power-elites narrow their standpoints and demonise the opposition, is the political equivalent of the trauma-induced physical blindness suffered by Daniel .” (en)
- "The War On Terror has by now provoked many stage works, many commentaries, many biting satires. But all that seemed important to me was to look straight into the heart of darkness and, like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat, to pull out light… My motive began as outrage, to tell the truth our Western governments were not telling us... And yet, even as these concerns formed the structure of our plot, so that outline was filled in by something else unexpectedly: by interweaving love stories, by a sacrament of compassion and divine forgiveness falling across all who strayed along this fateful path." (en)
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- Google search results are not viable references; the specific material should be linked directly (en)
- Full citation isn't given; programme is not readily accessible and can't be verified. (en)
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- Keith Burstein, from an interview with Süddeutsche Zeitung, (en)
- Keith Burstein in programme notes for the opera's Edinburgh Fringe Festival run in 2005 (en)
- Director David Wybrow, in programme notes for the opera's Edinburgh Fringe Festival run in 2005 (en)
- Dic Edwards, commenting on the inspirations for Manifest Destiny in The Observer (en)
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- Manifest Destiny is an opera composed by Keith Burstein with an English libretto by Dic Edwards. The opera is notable for dealing with the subject of Islamic suicide bombers, and with the ramifications of both the Middle Eastern conflict and the War on Terror. The opera has been staged twice: once at London's Tricycle Theatre in 2004 and once at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2005. Six years after the Edinburgh performances, the opera was extensively rewritten and restaged in London as Manifest Destiny 2011. (en)
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- Manifest Destiny (opera) (en)
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