In hotels things can fall apart. Dramas from Psycho to Peep Show have used hotel rooms as an outer expression of internal duplicity, faux-domestic interiors where the banal and the horrid might meet. The Last Hotel, the second opera from composer Donnacha Dennehy and librettist Enda Walsh, uses the titular hotel as setting for a personal unravelling.

The drama has three principal characters, the Husband (baritone Robin Adams), the Wife (soprano Katherine Manley), and the Woman (soprano Claudia Boyle). The Woman, a professional in a deep depression, has paid the Husband to meet her at a hotel to assist with her suicide. Once all are present, further tensions arise between the Husband and the Wife. The second act deepens things by showing us each character’s inner motivations and conflicts. As the clock ticks and we wonder whether the Woman will go through with it, it’s an engaging journey.

Dennehy’s generally lyrical vocal writing is at times beautiful. When the Woman and the Wife in sequence express their inner dreams (‘To feel like the sun’), Boyle and Manley elicit our pathos. Boyle’s plaintive soprano in particular shines. Dramatically Walsh often charges humdrum chitchat with ambiguous connotations, which, alongside the oppressive interiors and bubbling resentment, occasionally gives things a Pinter-lite hue. The glittering arpreggios accompanying much of the singing lend urgency to proceedings. The music, tonal and post-minimal, is played with precision by the Crash Ensemble.

Nevertheless, I wasn’t always convinced. Too often The Last Hotel lurches from naturalism into melodrama; the Husband’s motivation for murdering people, for example – getting money to build extensions to his house – is unimaginative. At times the ugly banality of the hotel unintentionally seeps into the music (an aria about a buffet dinner). An explosion of the extraordinary – something delirious, something to dream on – would have been welcome. In a related sense, more risks might have been taken with the score, which, though it features electric guitar, sampler and accordion, avoids using them to any radical end.

Misgivings aside, this is a confident, successful opera on a relevant contemporary topic. If, as I did, you found Louis Theroux’s recent BBC documentary on assisted suicide compelling, you should enjoy this disc.