The presentation of a new opera in Australia is an all too rare event and Michael Smetanin and Alison Croggon’s Mayakovsky, unveiled last night at Carriageworks, has been a good while in the baking. While the work may lack the populist edge of Mayakovsky’s own writing (Smetanin’s music for all its tonal variety and imagination makes relatively few concessions to accessibility from the aural perspective of the man on the street), it’s a rather brilliant construct, dramatically taut and graced with writing that understands the critical function of the libretto in opera. The text is poetically inclined (Croggon is first and foremost a poet), but it’s efficient and good at telling you what’s up with minimal fuss, and full of memorable verbal incident. If at times it’s hard to tell where Mayakovsky ends and Croggon begins, that is intended entirely as a compliment.

On the one hand a tribute to the poet who came to define the Russian Revolution, Mayakovsky is also an exploration of the artistic legacy of those turbulent times. Croggon’s savvy text manages to take in issues such as the artist’s place in society, censorship (to ban or not to ban), and the function of poetry in...