When greeted by a deconstructed, open set of brutal bleakness (designed by Jamie Vartan), haunted by the waste of the night before – a pink high-heeled shoe, empty coat hangers and discarded plastic cups – one is made immediately aware of the potency of Enda Walsh's theatrical aesthetic. There is a lone orange balloon offering a tragic echo of a party. Underscored with silence, The Hotel Servant (played by Walsh's long-term collaborator Mikel Murfi) enters and cleans the blood from the stained hotel room floor, and does so with a charisma equal to that of Michael Gambon in the opening scene of Krapp's Last Tape.

The Last Hotel, Walsh's first opera libretto, draws us into a hyper-reality that portrays acutely society's preoccupations and the all-consuming pain of loneliness: it's ‘Beckett meets Lynch’ in a tightly packed, propulsive rollercoaster ride towards one woman's assisted suicide.

Donnacha Dennehy's post-minimalist score is an immaculately orchestrated landscape of intricate pulsating polyrhythms, providing the listener with a necessary and weighted anchor within the often surreal and absurd theatrical world created by Walsh. Like the libretto, the music leans towards an Irish sensibility, leading our ears back to the sean nós songs of Irish Folk Music. The music seems to drift in and out of focus as our other senses are busied by the boldly intense and visceral theatrical world of Walsh, and it is this sensation that left me with the question, Does the score need to be the focal point of an opera? As an audience, are we wanting to hear a score that, when performed in a concert format, does not feel lost without its theatrical partner? Or are we craving a synthesis of art in which the several disciplines live and breathe only when presented as a whole?

The Last Hotel is opera in its most collaborative form. The score is not the focal point, but neither does it become submerged by the distinctive qualities of Walsh's aesthetic. The final, stratospheric duet between the Woman (Claudia Boyle) and the Wife (Katherine Manley), performed with the highest level of musical and acting skill, scores both voices with almost entirely the same melodic material, but with the Wife's line shadowing the Woman's a fraction of a second later. The musical texture exists as an evocative and fractured subtext to the on-stage action as we draw the parallels between the two female figures of the narrative, both tormented by the mundane obsessions of contemporary society. Dennehy's vocal writing displays his unquestionable awareness of the characters' subconscious narratives. The Woman, as she awaits her assisted suicide rehearsal, sings of the torments of anorexia and the dreams of previous hotel guests in high tessitura lyrical lines of indiscernible ascending questions, beautifully capturing the underlying neuroses that have led to her suicidal desires. The barely audible text does not act as a barrier to the narrative, but enhances the extreme psychological state of the suicidal Woman, as we try to understand her and her motives. Dennehy's perfectly timed musical wit is displayed in the Husband's (Robin Adams) buffet scene aria, ‘Filling Up Now’. His altering rhythmic repetitions and deconstruction of the text ‘filling up now’ underpin the Husband's obsessive-compulsive behaviour whilst highlighting Walsh's hilarious and brutal shattering of mankind's pitiful and banal needs.

Dennehy's inclusion of clashing musical genres enhances the array of theatrical practices explored by Walsh's libretto and direction of the opera. His striking and climatic synthesis of traditionally composed ensemble writing with ‘imported’ dance and pop music (most striking in his use of ’90s Irish girl group B*Witched) is refreshing in an art-form where so many creatives – librettists and composers alike – are averse to making the work relevant or even communicative to a non-new-music audience. I frequently leave new operas asking myself two questions: who, and what, is this for? The on-stage action in The Last Hotel utilises elegant physical theatre, most notably a moment in which the three central characters enter an elevator centre-stage whilst the lone Hotel Servant performs a sequence of raw and animalistic dance breaks. This is an opera that communicates through simple and complex means with an ease that undoubtedly stems from Walsh's previous theatrical explorations and is fully supported by Dennehy's post-minimalist aesthetic.

If you feel yourself deflating at the thought of seeing or hearing yet another self-aware opera overly concerned with the intellectual instead of the human, then this is the opera you must see. It is refreshing. It attempts and succeeds in so many areas that numerous other new operas don't – in the use of spoken dialogue; in the high level of emotional communication and acting skill from the singers, most notably Claudia Boyle and Katherine Manley; in the combination of recorded environment sound (seagulls, elevator and TV) within an operatic score … the list could go on. In comparison to the critically acclaimed offerings to the operatic canon by George Benjamin, Into The Little Hill and Written On Skin, this chamber opera gives so much more to an audience that is curious about theatre, people and creative storytelling. For me, The Last Hotel is one of the most successful works of theatre I have seen in the past five years.

Crash Ensemble's 12 players were conducted by André de Ridder, and on the Royal Lyceum Theatre stage was a cast of four: baritone Robin Adams, sopranos Claudia Boyle and Katherine Manley, and the renowned Irish actor Mikel Murfi. All gave exceptional performances on 12 August 2015, bringing to life this much-needed offering to the chamber opera canon. I use the term ‘canon’ with the optimism that a new opera might become part of the frequently performed repertoire, given the current living museum culture of the UK's opera scene. Landmark Productions' The Last Hotel offers an audience a theatrical and musical language that doesn't require frequent social and political reinterpretation in order to remain communicative and fresh. For once, I came away from a new opera asking questions about its narrative content (in this case assisted suicide, amongst a plethora of other societal issues) rather than about why it was ever written and for whom.