Fashioning Figaro

By LINDA HERRICK arts editor

Bad things can happen when directors "freshen" up beloved operas. Terrible sins have been visited upon Mozart's comedic masterpiece of sexual and class machinations, The Marriage of Figaro. At last year's Salzburg festival in Austria, few were impressed by the opera being set in a registry office, with a bearded musician wandering around blowing into beer bottles amid squalid props such as public loos.

Even worse was English National Opera's derided 2001 "Star Wars" version, with the Count and his entourage sporting Qui-Gon Jinn hairstyles and kalashnikovs, and a Ewan McGregor-lookalike Figaro in jeans. Fabulous? Not.

Colin McColl, who's directing the NBR New Zealand Opera production of Figaro, is not so cowed by those notorious stylistic failures that he wants to take the staging back to its safe, original 18th-century format. Instead, he has gone for the most glamorous of settings: a modern international fashion house.

"I wanted to look at the themes in a more contemporary way," he explains, "but there's a great danger when you're updating an opera that it can be banal and domestic. I once saw a production of La Boheme done by some opera students in London where Mimi wore a jean jacket sort of thing - no, no, it was just too North Shore.

"People don't want that when they go to the opera - they still want glamour. I toyed with the idea of setting it in the White House and someone even suggested the boardroom of an opera company," McColl guffaws, "but in the end, I was in [costume designer] Elizabeth Whiting's studio. Someone working for her was getting married and they were making things for it and I thought, oh, what a fantastic idea if this was on a huge scale in a big fashion empire."

The concept works because, says McColl, the hierarchy of a fashion house supports the basic elements of Figaro's plot: a lustful aristocratic boss, Count Almaviva (played by Roderick Earle), is cunningly outwitted by two of his employees, Susanna (Andrea Creighton) and her betrothed, Figaro (English baritone Mark Stone).

The couple, often oblivious to each other's intrigues, act within the context of a larger cast who have their own little games to play over what's been described as "one crazy day".

Figaro was considered highly subversive when Mozart wrote it in 1786 - it was critical of the power of the privileged classes (the French Revolution started in 1789), and it set feisty women at the centre of the action.

But Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte toned down the content considerably compared to its original source - the play The Crazy Day of the Marriage of Figaro by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais which was banned in France and Vienna, and was described by Napoleon as "the revolution in action".

The scandal? The premise that social class and gender were mere accidents of birth, and that a servant could assert his rights over his master's - and win.

"The class system thing is still there in this production but it's more about positions of power," says McColl.

"Almaviva is still a titled character but Susanna and Figaro are not servants, they are employees. Beaumarchais' play was considered incredibly offensive, which is hard for us to understand now, that a servant should be so against his master was shocking.

It was a precursor to the French Revolution, of course, and the play was banned in lots of places in Europe - which to Mozart was like a red rag to a bull. He's toned it down politically but I think the idea of a character who thinks he's as good as the boss is particularly appealing to New Zealanders."

A longtime veteran of theatre directing in New Zealand, McColl has ventured into opera just once before, in an International Arts Festival production of La Boheme in 1998. He became involved with this project at the invitation of NBR NZ Opera's new general director, Alex Reekijk - formerly the arts festival's executive director.

"It is a huge challenge for me, to be pulled out of my comfort zone," says McColl.

"It is so strange. I just did The Cherry Orchard for the Court in Christchurch which was gentle and underplayed. To suddenly find myself doing something for the Aotea stage - that's what keeps you on your toes."

There is a vast difference between working with actors and opera singers, says McColl. "Everything has to grow out of the music in opera so you have to immerse yourself in the music lots and lots to find the emotional content and inner thoughts of the characters.

"I was saying to the singers the other day, it's almost like we're going to close-up when they sing an aria, for instance. The arias are like the interior monologues, like the soliloquy in Shakespeare."

Not that several people all speaking dialogue at once would be viable in theatre, as opposed to opera.

"At the finale of Act II [an extraordinary piece which extends without a break for more than 940 bars] you gradually have eight people all singing at once.

"It's all true emotionally, what Mozart is doing, but you could never do that in a play - have eight people all talking at once. Imagine eight people doing 'to be or not to be', it would never work. That's the glory of working on an opera."

Another difference, McColl observes, "is that the singers were all contracted ages ago and I don't have any say in casting because I don't know anything about their voices".

"Normally I would be absolutely scrupulous about who I would cast in theatre productions so here it is a matter of getting to know each other's style of working. It is a terribly complicated plot and I want to bring a clarity to it."

While it has truly comedic moments, Figaro's music casts a yearning dimension of emotional depth over what can too easily slip into slapstick in the wrong hands [ENO and Salzburg].

"Overall the opera has something very unsettling about it, it is a world in a state of transition and there's a feeling things will never be the same. You can feel it in the music. So yes, there are some very funny moments but I'm trying to veer this away from silly business to give it more of a gravitas."

McColl finds opera singers astonishingly relaxed.

"Yes, gloriously relaxed, not like the stiff opera singers of old," he laughs. "I must say the first few days I found them so noisy. I guess they're used to projecting their voices but compared with actors they are really noisy.

"Someone told me that's because they come knowing their roles when they arrive, whereas actors learn as they go - they're always wandering around thinking about the characters, muttering lines to themselves in the tea breaks. Opera singers are busy gossiping!"

Seriously though, McColl says working with singers makes him "start to believe in song therapy where people sing into you to heal you. I don't know what it is but when they're singing it does make you feel better".

Ironic he should say that, sitting in a hotel bar where any high-art mood is being seriously undermined by Kylie Minogue's tweetie-bird Can't Get You Out of My Head. So McColl definitely has other singers in his head then when he says, "How do they produce those beautiful sounds out of those little bodies?"

* The Marriage of Figaro, with the Auckland Philharmonia conducted by Martin Andre: Aotea Centre, July 27, August 1, 4, 7, 10.