The electronic score vibrates alongside the emotional baritone of Richard Hamrin in the opera 'sad boy', which explores our self-staging on social media as heartbreak and infatuation turn into obsession and powerlessness.

A phone vibrates in the dark, and a heart breaks. The new opera performance 'sad boy' explores the boundary between our digital persona and physical self, between fiction and reality.

'sad boy' is created by the opera platform SAD GIRLS and is inspired by Francis Poulenc’s 1958 solo opera 'La Voix Humaine', about a woman’s desperate and fatal phone call to a lover. In 'sad boy', award-winning baritone Richard Hamrin takes the stage with newly composed music by Joel Janson Johansen. The smartphone weighs heavily in his hand, and the unreachable lover appears through text messages and voicemails. An intimate and transcendent stage experience unfolds as the audience’s own phones are involved, drawing us deep into sad boy’s obsession and loneliness.

Electronic synths, sound waves from a buzzing phone, and echoes from a nightclub are interwoven with clarinet, cello, and song cycles shaped like modern pop songs, written by librettist and director Sanna Strandberg Colling. At the center is a voice trembling with inconvenient and liberating emotions, in the late hours within the industrial setting of the venue Basement.