Some time ago going to see the opera stopped meaning dishing out your weekly food budget for a chance to test your fear of heights straight from the top of the Royal Opera House. These days fringe opera’s presence is big enough to warrant its own site and five years ago OperaUpClose was one of the companies to kick start this new wave; they did it by staging La Bohème above a pub in Kilburn, setting it in the present day and producing a new English translation in the process.

La Bohème later transferred to Soho Theatre – which is where we find OperaUpClose today. They are about to cut the ribbon on a 7 week run of Verdi’s Traviata, another pillar of the classic opera repertoire. Once again, there will be no surtitles and no massive orchestras on show, but that doesn’t mean this adaptation is a simple downsizing job. Director and librettist Robin Norton-Hale, Artistic Director of OperaUpClose, talked to Run Riot about why she thinks Verdi judged the audiences, the lure of the 1920s and the company’s plans for kick-starting new opera works.

Run Riot: Can you tell us about the process of adaptation you went through with La Traviata and the thinking behind it?

Robin Norton-Hale: La Traviata, although it's a big romantic opera - in a traditional production it has a very large orchestra and a very large chorus - is essentially a story about three people. It's about Violetta, the man she falls in love with, Alfredo, and his father. The other people in the story are necessary in terms of creating the world that they are in and the situation that makes it impossible for Violettaand Alfredo to be together, but actually the characters that are really central and drive the story are only the three of them. The other element that is completely essential to the narrative and to the music Verdi wrote is that this is an opera about hypocrisy. It's about the hypocrisy of society in judging women who don't match the moral levels that society has decided they should do and it's also wrapped up in a double standard where the levels which the women are expected to meet are higher than that of men, which I think has been the case throughout history and continues to be the case to a certain extent. I don't think this is something I’m projecting on to the opera - I think this is very clear in what Verdi wrote and also in his life. He had a long affair with a woman who wasn't his wife and he had to deal with people not respecting her in the way he felt she should be respected.

That was the starting the point. Then I thought - ok I have these three characters, what else do I need? I need to create the world in which this relationship could start but couldn’t continue and I’m thinking about where and when that world is, although I think women are still judged by different standards from men, in this country too, but especially sometimes in other places in the world.

Run Riot: You decided to set the production in the 1920s?

Robin Norton-Hale: What I wanted the audience to feel is that what would happen on stage is close to their experience, their existence, their time period, so they are not able to distance themselves from it too much. I wanted them to still connect to it and to a certain extent feel culpable in a way because I think what Verdi does more than anything else is he judges society in this opera. On the other hand I think there are certain elements to the story that mean we would have ended up tying ourselves up in knots if we tried to set the production here and now. Violetta in the original is a courtesan  - it's quite hard to translate that word into anything else, sometimes she is described as a high-class prostitute and that's not quite right, nor is she a mistress. She's a kept woman, she is paid either in terms of money or in terms of jewellery or clothes or essentially somewhere to live, in order to be the long term mistress of a man and then after a certain point when he's fed up of her, she is passed on to someone else. It's a very specific thing.

That’s why I went for the 1920s, the period immediately after the First World War. I think people feel like the 1920s, even if it’s nearly a hundred years ago, are not that far away from our experience now. It was a relatively relaxed time. It was quite a laid back era in terms of morals, women were smoking for the first time, you had the first massive era of movies, the explosion of capitalism and people wanting to own lots of things, so in some respects it seems like quite a free era, and yet at the same time there was still this absolute double standard, so that the women like Violetta would never ever mix or meet with the women who were the wives and meanwhile the men can move between these two worlds. So you have politicians, rich powerful businessmen, men of power, who have their proper public life with their wives and families but then there are places they can go where they can live in this second world with other women, like Violetta. And the women are pretty much fixed in one world or the other, and the men can move between the two. 

The other thing about the setting is that it's set in the United States, during the time of prohibition. That was inspired very much by the fact I was watching Boardwalk Empire and I was really struck by the two worlds in that period that the series really painted very clearly and all the hypocrisy and sordid nature. Alcohol became illegal and it kind of brought the gangsters out of the woodworks and the line between gangsters and illegal activity and politicians who maybe dabbled in a bit of corruption became much more blurred. For me with this production it was another layer of the hypocrisy in that people judge Violetta but actually what they are doing is much more immoral in terms of the laws of the time.

Run Riot: What's been your experience with what I'm very harshly going to call opera purists? Or perhaps let's call it the opera establishment. What’s their reaction to your productions?

Robin Norton-Hale: We know from talking to our audience and doing audience surveys that quite a lot of our audience are regular attenders at places like the Royal Opera House as well. So sometimes I think the opera critics assume that people who come to our shows are beginners to opera and then people might move on to go and see opera at the ROH. We know that's not the case. A lot of people do come to opera for the first time with us, or enjoy opera for the first time with us, because although yes, you can get a ticket to the ROH for £25 if you pay £25 you will be right at the back and it's a very different experience. It can be a wonderful experience, and I love going to the ROH, it's very spectacular and the orchestra and singers are world class, but if you're someone who likes going to theatre or maybe likes fringe theatre, likes having that up-close experience, actually it can be difficult to engage. So yes, we do get people who are new to opera, but equally we have a lot of people who say to us 'I like going to the ROH, I like going to the ENO, I still go there, but I've been going there for years and years and it was so lovely to discover OperaUpClose and discover opera in a new way. They don't see it as an either/or.

We let go of this idea in theatre years go – the idea that you can only do Shakespeare if you have an RP accent or if you have a cast of 40 or it's a classic play so you mustn't cut it, you mustn't mess around with it. I don't think what we're doing is remotely shocking, it's just a way of telling the story that works in the environment that we are working in, in the scale and with the singers and for the audiences that we have. In general we haven't come across opera purists who are offended by what we do, we occasionally get critics or people who just want to hear the best singer in the world singing Violetta. I would argue that the three people we have singing Violetta are all wonderful singers - none of them would sing it at the ROH because their voices are not that kind of voices, it's partly a question of scale, but they all sound completely different from each other and they’re all amazing actors. So I would say, if you let go of this idea that there are only a handful of singers in the world who should be singing Violetta and come and watch the actual performance in front of you and see the detail of acting they are able to do about dying of tuberculosis, see that they are spitting blood and then singing, it's pretty horrific in a really exciting way, which you simply can't have on a big stage.
Run Riot: One of the things that can be more difficult with opera as a genre - or at least can be more difficult than in dramatic theatre - is producing new work. It's a much more expensive endeavour even when it comes to writing, because it requires a librettist and a composer, more time and so on... Do you and the company have any interest in creating new pieces of operatic work in English?

Robin Norton-Hale: We do! This year, for the third year in a row, we're holding a competition called Flourish, which is a competition to write a chamber opera, for us to produce as OperaUpClose. It has to be for up to 7 performers and that's singers and instrumentalists.  So yes, we're very interested in creating new work. We think there's very little opportunity for composers to do so. It's very expensive, and then when it's so expensive the big opera houses want to have the premiere and they are not that interested in having the second production. Partly we wanted to have an opportunity to work on the scale that we can produce really well, but also works on that scale are much more likely to be revived because they are much more manageable. The first winner was performed last year, it was an opera called Two Caravans, which is a novel by Marina Lewycka, and that was a comedy opera about a serious subject - immigrants coming to England, dreaming of a better life and finding it much harder than they expected. We also produced the runner up from the competition which was a solo opera called Young Wife. This year we're producing an opera called Blank Canvas which will be opening in September, and on the last of performance of Blank Canvas is when we'll have a showcase of operas from this year’s competition and then the panel of judges from the industry will openly discuss our thoughts about the finalists and choose a winner. At the moment we're doing it once a year, there's less audience for it, we have to be honest, we'll do a handful of performances, about 8 rather than the 36 that we do normally, but I think as an opera company we have a duty to produce completely new work. That makes it sounds like it's not fun too - but of course it is. 

La Traviata

Soho Theatre

5^th August – 14^th September