Director returns with the great Brittens

Celebrating the centenary of Benjamin Britten’s birth, Opera North’s Autumn Season appropriately features three of the great English composer’s stage masterpieces.

Those masterpieces are Peter Grimes, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and A Death in Venice.

Turn the clock back 22 years and the season opened with a new production from Phyllida Lloyd, ‘an up-and-coming’ theatre director with no previous operatic experience.

Two years later she brought the young company, established in 1977, its first landmark production with a staging of Britten’s Gloriana. Later, the televised film of the opera, won for Lloyd an International Emmy Award.

“I knew of Britten’s music, but I was quite ignorant of his operas, and approached Gloriana with great trepidation,” recalls Lloyd.

“But it was the most problematic and exciting adventure I had ever had in the theatre.”

By the time of her staging of his comedy Albert Herring, she confesses to having become ‘completely hooked on the composer’, and was delighted to have been asked to return to direct Peter Grimes not long after.

The critically acclaimed production received television’s Southbank Show Award for Opera and the prestigious Royal Philharmonic Society Award for Opera & Music Theatre.

“It is just like working on a disc where you know that every track is going to be a hit,’ continues Lloyd.

“Its an absolute gift for a director, and the one great thing when you are working with Opera North is the ample time they give you and the cast to build towards the finished product. I have six weeks to stage this revival, which is more than many companies give to producers on an original production.”

The work itself, had a difficult beginning, the premiere in the small Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London given by a company made tired by incessant touring through the war years, and the outcome was far from the success the young composer had hoped for.

No doubt a large part of the problem was its harrowing story of the socially outcast fisherman, Peter Grimes, hardly in the mood of escapism the country needed in the mid-1940s.

Lloyd’s approach, which strips the scenery down to its bare essentials, is very different to the picture postcard sets that that Tyrone Guthrie gave to the opera’s first major staging at London’s Royal Opera House in 1947.

“I want the audience to interact with this man of power and optimism, but who is also totally dysfunctional and reacts violently to the fears and fury of the community who surround him in a way that outsiders have always reacted to such stress.

“It is all a question of working within the tempo and rhythm set by the composer and is much different to directing a play where you can create characters by the speed of diction and silences, and I want the singers in Grimes to feel they are composing the work as it is happening so as to create their characters.”

The revival sees the return of the imposing figure of Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts in the title role; Giselle Allen is cast as the schoolteacher, Ellen Orford, and Robert Hayward pictures the benevolent Captain Balstrode.

Jac Van Steen, who has recently conducted many remarkable concerts with the Opera North orchestra, makes his Leeds operatic debut.

In a total change of mood, Grimes is followed by the comedy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in an adaptation of Shakespeare’s play that concentrates on the antics of a group of rustics who stray into the magic of a wood inhabited by fairies.

With little more than corrugated plastic sheets as the backdrop, Martin Duncan’s colourful 2008 production returns with its the original main cast members. The remarkable countertenor of James Laing sings Oberon who fails in his efforts to get the upper hand on the slinky Titania of Jeni Bern.

Britten’s valedictory work, A Death in Venice, comes into the company repertoire for the first time in the staging from the inspirational director, Yoshi Oida.

It turns full circle from Grimes with the wealthy and lonely man, Gustav von Aschenbach, in love with the young boy he sees playing on the sands at the Venice Lido, and perhaps reflects the homosexual composer’s well-documented attraction to young boys.

Alan Oke, who has already taken the role to critical acclaim, shares the stage with Peter Savidge who enters the man’s thoughts in seven different guises.

In January the Winter Season opens with a new staging of Puccini’s Californian gold rush story, The Girl of the Golden West, from Aletta Collins, a director who is causing ripples in the opera world with her new look productions.

Alwyn Mellor, Rafael Rojas and Robert Hayward take the leading roles.

Last year making a dash from Manchester airport to arrive just in time to save the company’s opening night of Wagner’s Die Walkure, the sensational American soprano, Kelly Cae Hogan, sings the leading role in Tim Albery’s ‘bloody and energetic’ view of Verdi’s Macbeth.

Promising to bring with her a very exciting young cast, April sees Phyllida Lloyd return with her iconic presentation of Puccini’s La Boheme, the story of ill-fated love now set in a seedy bed-sit in 1950’s Paris.

Peter Grimes opens at Leeds Grand Theatre on September 14. A Midsummer Night’s Dream from September 28 and Death in Venice opening on October 17. Tickets and details www.operanorth.co.uk, 0844 8482700.

From city stage to Hollywood

While she is much in demand after recent success in the movies, Phyllida Lloyd is happy to return to Opera North, because it is a company that was there at the beginning of her career.

After graduating from Birmingham University, she worked for the BBC before moving to theatre to work at the RSC and the National and then on to work internationally through Opera North. She went on to direct a number of major operas across the world.

She turned to musical theatre with Mamma Mia! The stage version was such a hit that she went on to direct the movie and then The Iron Lady.