‘Radical creator' takes a ‘kaleidoscopic look at love' in Shakespeare-adjacent opera

The Age

2 days ago

'The scenarios that are presented in The Fairy Queen are a kind of kaleidoscopic look at love in every aspect,' she says. 'It's all about love and marriage, loss, sorrow, unrequited love – every possible angle. The universal experience of love.'
Indeed, one of the opera's most affecting numbers begins with the line, 'If love's a sweet passion/why does it torment?'
The libretto, thought to be by Thomas Betterton, is best described as Shakespeare-adjacent. No named characters from A Midsummer Night's Dream appear in it. Instead, we have personifications of the seasons, night and sleep, and fairies and green men. There's a comic scene for a rustic couple, Corydon and Mopsa, traditionally sung by bass and countertenor.
'What felt more interesting for me, for this production, was to allow The Fairy Queen to stand very much by itself,' Jones says.
'It's got a fantastic structure, it really works as a theatrical piece. Although it's a series of vignettes, they are structured together in a very clever way. Purcell was brilliant – he died when he was 36 – but he was such an interesting, curious, people-loving person. He was amazing.'
British director Jones is known as an innovative theatre-maker who often incorporates video in her shows. Her recent production of Peter Grimes for Gothenburg Opera in Sweden was praised in The Observer for its devastating impact, and noted Jones as a 'radical creator who uses video to original effect'. She works with a team of designers and technicians at her creative studio, Lightmap.
This is her first project with an Australian company, although in 2017 she brought her production of The Dark Mirror – a version of Schubert's Winterreise – with Ian Bostridge, to the Perth Festival. Pinchgut was lucky to secure Jones' services; last December she took up the newly created role of associate director of the Royal Opera.
Jones has set this production of The Fairy Queen in a modern city that could be Sydney, with the action taking place across a 24-hour period. A wide video screen will reach across the back of the stage.
'The production will be very visual – there are lots of changes, lots of colour,' she says.
'The first production of The Fairy Queen almost bankrupted the theatre because they put everything in it. We can't do that but we can use the technology at our disposal to do something that's very visual. We've included dance and other elements of baroque theatre but we've just made it very contemporary.'
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At the Royal Opera, Jones is charged with bringing in new commissions, new artists and new ways of addressing opera as an art form, working out of the Linbury Theatre.
'[Opera] has been with us 300 years, it's not going away,' she says. 'It's an art form, not a medium. Media do tend to come and go – we may have something different to television in our domestic lives in the future. Whereas opera and painting and poetry and play-making, they are not the same.
'Companies have felt the squeeze but the work will live on and shift into something that is much more central to our cultural life. Sometimes when something is under threat you become more active in protecting it.'
Purcell's music for The Fairy Queen was all but lost until its rediscovery in 1901. Growing interest in early music led to its revival. In 2003 the barely year-old Pinchgut Opera chose The Fairy Queen for its second production, after making its debut the previous year with Handel's Semele.
Helyard says he has chosen to return to The Fairy Queen to show how far this small but musically rigorous company has come.
'Back then we weren't quite as stylistically confident with playing and singing this kind of music,' he says. 'This seemed like the perfect piece to go to the Ros Packer Theatre, our premiere there, and to revisit Purcell.'
Back in the rehearsal room at the Drill Hall, the wedding party is in full swing. Mezzosoprano Anna Fraser rises from her seat, mock-drunkenly staggers to centre stage and begins to sing: 'Hark! How all things in one sound rejoice …'
Almost on cue, rain starts to fall, like a thousand fairies drumming on the iron roof.