Awakenings Opera Opens Three Decades After Hollywood Movie

A medical experiment conducted on patients afflicted by a pandemic from a different era by the celebrated British neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks has inspired a major new opera having its world premiere in America last weekend. In the experiment Dr. Sacks brought patients in a New York hospital back to consciousness after they’d been left virtually comatose for four decades by the so-called sleeping-sickness pandemic of the 1920s. Sacks’ work was the subject of an acclaimed Hollywood movie Awakenings – but now as Tom Brook reports it’s a full opera.