Opera Queensland’s Rusalka opens deep in its heroine’s own sea world — her sisters and her father, Vodník the Water King, glimpsed low and hazy beneath a mirrored ceiling of floating lilies, as if we’re looking up at the surface from underwater ourselves. Behind the performers, a screen carries a soft, magical projection of a solitary figure swimming — a glimpse of the human world above, and everything Rusalka longs for. It’s a striking way to open a nearly three-and-a-quarter-hour opera, and this production, running at QPAC’s Glasshouse Theatre until 4 July, backs it up scene after scene.
The Story
Dvořák’s Rusalka — his ninth opera and by far his most performed, outstripping the combined total of all his others in productions staged worldwide each year — draws from the same well as Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, but its heroine is no passive romantic. Rusalka, a water nymph unhappy in the underwater world she shares with her sisters and father, falls for a human Prince and strikes a bargain with the witch Ježibaba to become human herself — at the cost of her voice. It’s a sacrifice that gives the opera’s famous “Song to the Moon” its ache, and one that director Sarah Giles has deliberately shaped around a more active, searching heroine than the fairy tale tradition usually allows. As Giles has put it, this is a woman “courageously seeking where she belongs,” not simply trading herself away for a Prince’s affection.
The Performances
Eleanor Lyons brought real subtlety and power to the title role, tracing Rusalka’s arc from despair to hope without ever overplaying it. Rosario La Spina’s Prince and Warwick Fyfe’s Vodník matched her scene for scene — Fyfe in particular giving the Water King a gravity that made Rusalka’s defiance of him land with real consequence — while Ashlyn Tymms’s Ježibaba and Eva Kong’s Duchess rounded out a cast where every principal was pulling their full dramatic weight, vocally and physically.
Design and Staging
As a three-act opera, Rusalka moves through distinct worlds — underwater, human, and the strange netherworld beyond — and the production met each with stunning changes in stage design and costuming, each shift setting the tone and emotion of the scene to come. That large screen behind the performers turned out to be one of the night’s more playful touches, bookending the opera as it returned in the final act’s strange netherworld, echoing the same submerged, magical imagery that opened the show. The Queensland Symphony Orchestra, playing live, filled the Glasshouse Theatre with a reverence that anchored the opera’s deeply emotional arc from first note to last.
The Verdict
This is a story of first love, of stepping into an unfamiliar world, and of what’s lost — physically and vocally — in trying to belong somewhere else. It’s a delightful tale that ends in tragedy, while still leaving room for hope.
World-class, beautifully paced, and spectacularly designed, Rusalka is proof that an age-old craft still has plenty to say in the 21st century.
Rusalka runs at the Glasshouse Theatre, QPAC, until 4 July 2026.
Photography by Steph Do Rozario.
