How do you feel about very small operatic venues where the stage is basically in the lap of the audience? Do you think that stifles opera?
I directed The Tales of Hoffmann for the Hampstead Garden Opera (HGO) at the Gatehouse in April. It is not the most sensible stage for opera. First of all, because you’ve got to be so stage-aware: you have the audience on your right as well as in front of you and the balance with the audience isn’t equal, and you have the conductor on your left.
That’s why I decided to mask the orchestra. Well, people want to watch the orchestra as well as hear them, but when they are right next to the stage, when you want to create an illusion of intimacy, which is essential for the Antonia scene, which we did with the small carpet, the screen with the Mother’s portrait and the chez-longue at an angle. But, if you’re looking straight through to the bassoon player picking his nose, you lose the spell. And also the sound was better, slightly muffled, the balance was better.
I think the designer did a very good job with the curtain that went all the way across the back. It transformed the place from a functional square stage to a beautiful fantasy space in one sweep. That big sweep is so theatrical.
When you are in character and you know that your music reflects your character, you can be as close to the audience as you want, because you have them in your spell.
That was your first opera. How did you end up doing an opera, being trained as a theatre director?
I had done plays and musical theatre before. The original director for Hoffmann, a contemporary of mine in Cambridge, got a job he couldn’t refuse, the new Harry Potter film, so he turned to me and I was interviewed by the HGO people.
Did you ever think that you would want to try your hand at opera before that happened?
I’d wondered about it because it is the most heightened form of musical drama that you can get. You know we are not going to be naturalistic here, you break through to a new way of expressing the truth. In musical theatre you are treading the boundary a little bit more closely because the dialogue is more natural, the singing is done in the character accents and there are fewer conventions to observe.
In opera you are breaking through, you are using art mixed in the real people’s experience to get to the truth in situations, and that appealed very much. Also, the texture of working with music and with song is so appealing, especially compared to ordinary dialogue.
That’s the way I feel about Shakespearean verse, for example. You look at the verse, you identify the rhythm, you identify when he’s deviating from the rhythm, where the rhyme is, where the stresses are, whether the lines are finished, and you apply the same techniques to a piece of song, to a sung scene or to an aria - and you unlock all sorts of secrets.
Also, I enjoy very much working with large casts, shaping colours with the chorus.
Are you a trained musician? You work very closely with the score.
That was a challenge I wanted to set myself. I do read music, although I only played the piano to about Grade Three (my mother always wanted me to learn and I always wanted to be climbing trees). Over the years of work with the musical theatre I’ve begun to work more closely with the vocal scores. And in musical theatre you can not do that because in the libretto the dialogue is written up and all the songs are printed like poems, in capitals, where they fit in the script.
What is the challenge involved in directing opera?
With Hoffmann, I first thought I’d write out all the lyrics in the arias and just interpolate them into the dialogue, but then I decided to force myself to work closely from the score. You cannot tell the story without understanding what the music is doing. That’s quite scary because it meant working with bar references as opposed to line references and I hadn’t been that specific before, but I think that’s the only way to do it properly. You also have to go to the full sound track because you have to know what the orchestra are really doing, which the piano score doesn’t reflect.
Introductions are very important: when the character does the aria, whose music is in the introduction, how the scene is set. Here, The Fiddler on the Roof taught me a lot.
Towards the end, there is this beautiful song where the father is giving up his daughter because she is marrying a non-Jew. It’s the hardest decision for him because she is his favourite daughter. The question that the music is asking is, ‘Do you love me?’ which is the refrain from the previous song. I wouldn’t know that if I only looked at the text. But the audience would know. He is singing about losing his daughter and the music is asking, ‘do you love me?’
I did The Fiddler at the Edinburgh Fringe last year. It sold out and got five-star reviews. We put the audience and the company in the same place. We didn’t define the stage and through that we painted the real sense of community.
That was my second time at the festival. We are going there this year with The Bluebeard’s Wives which was a sell-out at the Institute of Contemporary Art in June.
How do technical directors usually react to a woman producer?
It’s never been something that I‘ve considered. I behave like a director, I treat them with the respect that they deserve and expect them to treat me with respect if I do my job well. It’s never been an issue.
Isn’t the world of producing sexist?
Well, I know that it‘s always been a man’s world. My way of dealing with that is not acknowledging it at all. I am going to do the best that I can. In Cambridge there were cries of male domination but I just put my head down and apply for what I want to do and do it well. I’m not giving it a second thought. I certainly don’t think I’ve ever been discriminated against.
I’m aware that on the high levels of the profession there very few female directors. But there are more and more.
The HGO are having a female director number four. Emma Rivlin, Clare Prenton, Rachel Grunwald and now Laura Baggeley. Is that a new trend?
Out of my contemporaries in Cambridge there were six from my year who wanted to become directors, two or three of them were women. I don’t know how many will make it. I cannot speak for opera, either.
Are you tempted to do another opera?
Yes, I am. I would like to do opera buffa or one of the operas based on Shakespeare, like Macbeth or Romeo and Juliet
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What would be your opera of a great theatrical potential, a composer whose music makes you sense the drama?
Eugene Onegin appeals so much because the choices of the characters are so unique and their strengths are so unique. It is so specific that it becomes universal. But the first composer would be Beethoven, his Pastoral Symphony does that, I see that in colours. I like very much Mozart’s light touch. Or the beginning of Madama Butterfly, with everybody coming up over the hills by the sea. Something very expansive where I can use the chorus to paint the pictures.
After the HGO’s Hoffman you went to Glasgow to watch the rehearsals of The Magic Flute. What was it like to jump from a minuscule, semi-professional stage to a big, national one?
I was gob-smacked. The rehearsals at the warehouse had a full height set, with a full depth stage, with four stage managers in, a stage supervisor, a director, a staff producer, a movement director. There was a conductor, an assistant conductor and two repetiteurs. 14-15 people when only one singer was rehearsing . We had to do everything ourselves at HG0 and we rehearsed in a church hall with no set. Those 14 people doing very little each…The Scottish Opera is not a rich company, so if you ask me how to improve on it, you could economise and have less people for the six weeks of the production rehearsal.
The singers were very friendly, they don’t work any differently form other singers. Everyone who is trying to perform does their best in much the same way, except they knew their lines better...
What did you learn from that experience?
Obviously, I would not have benefited from that if I hadn’t worked with HGO first. It was intriguing. There were things I would have done differently and it was interesting to bite my tongue. I was an observer, I just had to watch and let it happen.
I noticed that singers in Glasgow were very keen on being singers and not actors. The director has to say, ‘no, you are performers, you have to do both’, but also to be supportive, to build up their confidence as actors. Those issues opera directors should not shy away from, they have to tackle them from the very first rehearsal.
You probably don’t believe that singers should stand and deliver?
Oh, god, no. But I appreciate that other people do!
You can change your position in between your bits of singing. There is a relationship of bodies on stage, there is making sure that people look at each other at times and approach and look away, making sure that people on stage create visual pictures, with the spatial awareness of their bodies, to further what is going on in the music. It is about keeping the character.
What do you think about type-casting?
I experimented with casting against type in Cambridge. In Much Ado About Nothing I deliberately cast all the people against type. The result was great fun. People were pleased with the chance and rose to the challenge. They separated acting from personality. It enables differentiating yourself properly from the character. People are forced to work that much harder.
What is directing?
I honestly believe that directing is about feedback. I don’t believe directors should say, ‘Do this!’ A director’s singer is not someone obliging, it’s someone willing to try wholeheartedly. The key to get most out their performance is to make them comfortable with trying things they might otherwise feel silly about. Otherwise you don’t stretch yourself and you don’t find where art should be and how it should sit.
A director can help singers when they are having trouble with their acting. When opera singers have to do dialogue, they should know that naturalistic dialogue is a trick. It is a convention as much as singing is a convention. It can be hard when the prop of the music is taken away from you. That can be hard for an opera singer, because the music is your convention there, it is your medium.
Dialogue has its own naturalism and most opera dialogue is fighting its naturalism. It is not how people really speak. It is important to say that there are rules to observe as much as you have to observe you singing rules. Some of them are very basic, about being loud enough and facing out into the audience, and some are about carrying the energy through a line, like you do with music.
Another is about the rhythm of riposte and argument. Every piece of dialogue has its own natural rhythm which works best. It is all about understanding that there are rules that you can play by to do your dialogue well, so you don’t have to feel like completely at sea, with all your props pulled away from you when you have to turn to dialogue. It is also understanding the position of the dialogue. If you have dialogue on either side of your aria, is your aria just describing your state of mind or is it signalling a change. You then apply the change to the dialogue before and after the aria.
How do you see the purpose of rehearsal?
Rehearsal, in one sense, is rehearsing the role of the audience. The singers are rehearsing their roles and I am rehearsing the role of the audience. I am watching out for things that don’t make sense. If I can’t empathise with the majority of the people coming to watch the opera, I have no business directing it.
What do you do in your spare time? What are your hobbies?
I love rock climbing. I took it up about five years ago. Living in London I mostly climb indoors, although I have done climbing in the Peak District, Wales, Italy and Southern America. On Sunday afternoons you can find me in Mile End or in another climbing centre, in Hendon. I also do girly things; my best friends are girls. We meet to gossip and drink wine.
What are your plans?
I still feel very much like an opera novice. Before I direct an opera again I need to go and see an awful lot more, to understand what opera audiences go for. I think you always need to know what the audience are there for, so you can take them on a journey. At this point I don’t know opera audiences well enough to know how to manipulate them. So that’s my research, to watch opera audiences very carefully, to see what experience I give them when I am putting an opera in front of them.
I would like to get back and do some more Shakespeare. I think I’ve got an aptitude for the verse and the story. That’s something I want to build on by directing more, by assisting much more experienced directors and learning how they do it.
View Rachel's page HERE...
See Hoffmann's review HERE...
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