Suddenly, they are all singing at once, jostling for space and crouched on the floor in deafening proximity. A man in a builder’s hat and fluorescent jacket strides into the m?e, breaking off from singing to complain that he has been “clobbered” with too many props – namely, a stepladder, a megaphone and a chainsaw

This is no ordinary opera rehearsal But then Push! is no ordinary opera. It is the world’s first opera about giving birth, and I am watching the cast labour through scene six. The woman on the table is playing Mary, an IVF patient who believes that she is expecting triplets but is actually expecting quintuplets (“Fifty fingers and thumbs, fifty toes/ Ten ears, ten eyes, five bums to wipe/ Five voices/ One me,” she squawks at the discovery). The music director, Tim Murray, leans across from his score to hand me a model of what appears to be a wigwam but is, in fact, a mini-Mary dressed in an enormous, tent-like maternity dress. On stage, Mary’s babies will peek out from under her voluminous skirts; for now they must improvise with a table and a curtain.
Mary’s is one of six labours and births that make up Push!, the latest production from the experimental opera company T? ??. The eight singers, accompanied by a 13-piece orchestra, will also introduce us to Nimmy, a football fanatic who barely tears herself away from the match to give birth; Cara, a single mother uncertain of who has fathered her child; Maddy, a prisoner who must hand her baby over for adoption; and Angela, whose baby is stillborn.

A budding love affair between a maternity-ward cleaner and a hospital porter is interwoven with the extreme comedy and tragedy of these individual scenarios, culminating in the cleaner’s own experience of giving birth.Push! was conceived by the composer David Bruce and the playwright Anna Reynolds for the Genesis Opera Project and was chosen as one of three finalists out of 200 international applications to the scheme. In 2004, Bankes-Jones attended a workshop performance at Sadler’s Wells and suggested a full-length production with his company, T? ??.”It’s extraordinary that nobody has written it before. Birth is a thing that makes you go ‘aaaaaah’,” Bankes-Jones says, pointing out the natural affinity that exists between one of nature’s greatest and noisiest dramas and the frequently melodramatic art form. “Operas are always about falling in love and dying, things that make us go to extremes.”Bruce had previously worked with the company on Shorts and Six Pack, two productions that presented six 10-minute operas by six composers in a single evening. His unconventional offerings, Seven Tonnes of Dung (“about a caterpillar, a spider and a dung beetle – a bit of a farce, as you can imagine”) and Has It Happened Yet? (“about three old ladies going to watch an eclipse”), were a perfect fit with the company’s inventive and irreverent approach to the genre and drew critical acclaim.Reynolds’ play Goodbye Stranger, about a series of one-night stands, acted as the initial inspiration for Push!. “We really liked the idea of a series of stories linked by one common thing, rather than a straightforward linear narrative,” the playwright explains.

“Since every birth is so different but they all have things in common, it seemed an ideal structure to follow, and David really liked the idea of a series of one-night stands followed by a series of births.”For Reynolds, going from playwright to librettist was a daunting proposition. “With a play, you’re left to your own devices and it’s your own creation. With this, I would write something and David would say: ‘It needs to feel more like an aria here,’” she says. “As the librettist, you’re serving the composer, and that’s a completely different approach.”"Anna didn’t really know anything about opera when she came to the project,” says Bruce. “I joke with her now that in some of the early drafts she was putting on an opera voice, a stereotypical idea of what an opera might be.”The finished libretto is sharply written, bitingly funny and touching by turns, and far from stereotypical.