Our Eyes Looking for God runs at the Barbican from Wednesday 9 to Sunday 13 September 2026.
TD Moyo wrote Our Eyes Looking for God during 2020, in the months after George Floyd’s killing, and adapted it from his own play Caspers. It is an opera about identity, state violence and love, not a subject the form is usually handed, and the argument for using the form at all is that opera can hold all three at once at a volume speech cannot.
The team is the interesting part. Moyo writes and directs; the composer is Renell Shaw, an Ivor Novello winner who came out of pop and production rather than the conservatoire; the librettist is April Koyejo-Audiger, a British-Nigerian soprano who writes as well as sings; Mateus Daniel directs the movement. It is co-produced by the Barbican with Northern Opera Group, which is a Leeds company, not a London one. Northern Opera Group makes work in Leeds on a fraction of a London budget and has spent a decade putting on operas nobody else will.
It runs at the Barbican from Wednesday 9 to Sunday 13 September 2026 and opens the centre’s 2026/27 classical season — the Barbican programming a new opera by a first-time opera writer in the slot a house normally gives to a visiting orchestra. It is filed under both the classical and the theatre strands, because the categories have not settled around it. Recommended for fifteen and over.