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Interviews
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Robert Lepage: Taking on 1984 Prior to the opening night of Lorin Maazel's controversial new operatic vision of 1984, its director, Robert Lepage set out his views on the project. Lepage was interviewed in the Clore Studio Upstairs at the Royal Opera House by Kevin Rainey, Covent Garden's Opera Education Manager. Robert Lepage is known as one of the greatest theatre directors alive. His theatre masterpieces have included the epic Seven Streams of the River Ota and more recently, The Far Side of the Moon. On film, he is perhaps best known for The Confessional and Polygraph. It is unusual for a director to give an interview immediately before the curtain rises on a major new piece of work but then this Canadian is no ordinary director. His appearance is calculated to have an immediate effect, as he was wearing a bright turquoise shirt beneath a tailcoat. Indeed, as he took his bow on the stage some four hours later (to a chorus of bravos and a lone cry of "rubbish"), he was more colourfully dressed than anybody else, including the whole of the cast. 1984 was very much Lorin Maazel's baby from the very start. In the fall of 2000, somebody had suggested that the perfect director might be Lepage. After a meeting in Europe, the two began working together on this ambitious new opera. 1984 was composed over a period of about three and a half years and Lepage admitted that it was still being adapted at a very late stage, probably even as he sat before the public in the rehearsal room that was doubling as a lecture theatre. He expressed this rather poetically by saying that "The paint is very fresh". It did not take Lepage long to become hooked on the idea. "Opera is about larger than life themes. 1984 is a tragedy about humanity being under the burden of some external force - like Greek tragedy". He went on to say that "This novel was crying out to become an opera". It became particularly timely and desperately relevant soon afterwards, in a world coming to grips with the aftermath of the bombing of the World Trade Centre in September 2001. Unusually for an opera or theatre director, Lepage was involved before Maazel had written a word or a note. He was determined to assert himself and stamp his own imprint on 1984 even though the conductor/composer had a reputation as a strong man. "If he had stage ideas, I was going to have some music ideas". Rainey had suggested that, like Maazel as a composer, this was Lepage's first venture into opera. He was soon disabused and reminded that 13 years before, the director had worked on Bluebeard's Castle and Erwartung, while more recently, he had collaborated with Seiji Ozawa on The Damnation of Faust, a production that is currently being revived in Paris. Composer and director were very much of one mind with regard to the nature of the music that was needed to portray 1984 on stage. It was necessary to convey a feeling of wistfulness about the past so that there are elements of nursery rhyme and the music of cafe singers tapping into a kind of musical memory that we all have. When asked about the relationship between the opera and Orwell's novel, he was adamant that "The staging is extremely faithful to the book" although he admitted that the libretto had a great deal more freedom and a lot of "jump-cuts". The financing of 1984 has proved to be immensely controversial, as it is rumoured that Lorin Maazel has not only waived his conducting fee but has also dipped into his own funds to a considerable extent in order to bring it to the stage at Covent Garden. Not surprisingly, Lepage was reticent in commenting on this subject but did admit that Maazel was substantially financing the show through the medium of his company, Big Brother Productions, which is working closely with the Lepage's own much longer established Ex Machina. He emphasised though that Covent Garden was also supporting the Opera both physically and financially, particularly because of Orwell's British associations. Kevin Rainey made it clear that the Royal Opera House was as committed as ever to producing new work. Moving on to the rehearsal process, Lepage identified major differences between opera companies and those working in theatre. As he put it, in theatre you start at -20 since very deliberately, the actors do not wish to impose their own views on a production. By contrast, since the music contains all of the subtext, opera singers have a pretty good idea of where they are going before they arrive at a theatre for the first time and therefore they start at +20. Working with a composer is also very different from Lepage's normal processes. "It's a radically different challenge than when I do my own personal work in the theatre. In opera, which is about the human voice, as a director you have to favour the voice and the set or concept has to help this". There is no doubt in his mind as to the value of opera in today's society. He says that "opera is the great modern art" and radically suggested that he would like to see MTV taking extracts from 1984 in order to introduce opera to a completely new audience. Lepage believes that 1984 is still a very contemporary work. "This is because Orwell saw very early on how language would be used to manipulate people. We are very much into that now". He then summed up in a few words why this was the case when he said "This very crazy and pessimistic vision is very much our world today". Sadly there are few that would disagree.
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