Charles Marlow
Marlow's name may be inspired by the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe. Conrad's father was a translator of William Shakespeare who doubtless would have known of Marlowe's work as well. Some intertextual interpretations of "Heart of Darkness" have suggested that Marlowe's "The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus" may have influenced Conrad. Charles Marlow describes a character as a "papier-mache Mephistopheles", a reference to the Faust legend. Marlow's and Kurtz's journey up the Congo River in "Heart of Darkness" also has similarities to another work by Marlowe, "Dido, Queen of Carthage", in which Aeneas is stranded on the shore of Libya and meets the African queen Dido.
Tarik O'Regan
In 2011, "Heart of Darkness", O'Regan's chamber opera in one act, with an English-language libretto by artist Tom Phillips, based on the novella of the same name by Joseph Conrad was premiered at the Linbury Theatre of the Royal Opera House. The idea for the opera first came to O'Regan in 2001. It received wide critical attention and marked his first foray into operatic writing. A suite for orchestra and narrator was extrapolated from the opera and was given its London premiere by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and actor Samuel West in April 2013. In May, 2015, "Heart of Darkness" received its North American premiere in a production by Opera Parallèle, presented by Z Space in San Francisco, California. Since the opera, O'Regan composed several pieces influenced by North Africa, which include his first collaborations with both the Dutch National Ballet and the Australian Chamber Orchestra. Recently some of his output has formed the focus of festivals such as the 2014 Vale of Glamorgan Festival and "New Music for New Age" from The Washington Chorus. O'Regan's first full-length ballet score ("Mata Hari", based on the life of Margaretha Zelle MacLeod), commissioned by the Dutch National Ballet with choreography by Ted Brandsen, opened on February 6, 2016 in Amsterdam. On September 30, 2016 "Mata Hari" was released in DVD and Blu-ray formats by EuroArts, distributed by Warner Classics; the ballet will be revived for a further run in October, 2017. In February, 2017, O'Regan's first album of orchestral music, "A Celestial Map of the Sky", performed by The Hallé under the direction of Sir Mark Elder and Jamie Phillips, was released on the NMC label. The album entered the British Official Charts at number seven in the Specialist Classical Chart and number 18 in the Classical Artist Albums Chart. In the same year he was elected both to an Honorary Fellowship of Pembroke College, Oxford, and to the board of Yaddo.