The Answer to Everything: When a house is not a home

The Royal Opera House and Glyndebourne have relayed live operas to cinemas. But for the first time next week, an opera will premiere at a London cinema.

Streetwise Opera's The Answer to Everything at the BFI Southbank, which combines operatic film and live opera, is about a fictional housing corporation that claims to have solved the housing crisis with an indestructible brick. It stars Streetwise Opera's performers from homeless charities and has new commissions by composers including Gavin Bryars.

The audience will be given conference packs about Locateco Solutions, whose claims are shown to be false promises. The company anthem is a re-interpretation of Faust's “Soldiers' Chorus”. “There is an underlying emotional content within the music which breaks through the rhetoric of the conference. The opera is about people looking more deeply at each other. For us that is looking beyond what it is to be homeless and looking at the person rather than the label.”

'The Answer to Everything', BFI Southbank, London SE1 (bfi.org.uk) 23 to 25 April