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THUNDER AND LIGHTING Martin Duncan and Francis O’Connor talk to Henrietta Bredin about the challenge of a naturally-lit stage The opera pavilion at Wormsley, designed by the architect Robin Snell for Garsington Opera, appears to hover over the ground, like a sleekly exquisite spacecraft coming in to land. During the daytime light floods through its transparent sides and at night it glows from within. This makes it a very beautiful structure to look at but a challenging one in which to present operas, in particular as far as lighting is concerned. It is not an enclosed space—the original brief was for a building that could be taken down and packed away at the end of each summer opera season—and performances that start in the early evening are surrounded by waning natural light, while the second half, after the long interval, occurs after the sun goes down. Garsington is unique in this regard among the major contenders in the flourishing country house opera stakes. The director Martin Duncan and designer Francis O’Connor have worked, together and with other artistic colleagues, on operas at both old Garsington—a sort of theatrical lean-to propped up against the eponymous manor— and new—a purpose-built opera space nestled in a fold of the Chilterns at Wormsley, Paul Getty’s Buckinghamshire estate. This summer they are collaborating on an Offenbach rarity, Fantasio. ‘It is the only country house set-up that’s truly outdoors,’ says O’Connor, ‘the only one that relies on natural light, the only one where you’re able to play with and take into account a sense of the environment around.’ ‘Ideally,’ says Duncan, ‘you would always try to choose operas that don’t actually start at night. Unlike Fantasio! This is the first time that’s happened to us—we’ve always been lucky before, but this opera is really supposed to start with the moon coming out. Jeremy Sams has done a little gentle doctoring of the text in his English ■  Al fresco Britten: Rebecca Bottone as Tytania in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ at Garsington Manor in 2010 translation to deal with that.’ For O’Connor the challenge is how to calculate the way in which the light will affect what the audience sees on stage. ‘You have to think very specifically about what the light will do during the first few scenes. If you’re designing something in a traditional theatre, indoors, you’ve got artificial light that you can control. You can enhance the colours, achieve a richer saturation. When you’re outside, the light tends to be less forgiving, it’s harsher, and 556 Opera, May 2019
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■  Garsington Opera in the pavilion at Wormsley: Vivaldi’s ‘La verità in cimento’ unpredictable—a cloud comes over and it changes completely. I think of everything I can do to make the set sympathetic to natural light, which is why I tend to use a lot of texture. What we have to do in order to allow for those variations is to light for no light, as it were. Even if the opera starts in clear natural light we always create a basic lighting state. In good weather you wouldn’t need to light those early scenes, but if it clouds over, people have to be able to see.’ What this also means for a creative team is that they are obliged, before the show opens, to have their technical lighting sessions late at night because they have to wait for darkness before they can start. ‘It can be pretty miserable,’ admits Duncan. ‘Everyone else goes home and you sit there, wrapped in layers and freezing cold, working your way through the lighting plot. There was one horrible occasion at Opera Holland Park when there was a student on the lighting board who accidentally lost all the cues. The computer just wiped itself because he hadn’t programmed it properly and we had to go back and start all over again. We didn’t finish till past two in the morning by which time, even though the management had organized taxis to take us home, the park gates were locked. We had to climb over these huge railings and I remember having a complete sense of humour failure and thinking, “Would Sir Peter Hall do this? He would not!”’ The mention of freezing cold does bring up another issue for outdoor opera performances: the unpredictability of summer weather. At Garsington Manor, during performances of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the particularly small and slender soprano Rebecca Bottone, singing the role of Tytania, grew so cold in her fairy bower as she waited to be awoken by Oberon that the stage crew were obliged to slip a hot water bottle between her sheets; the rain lashed down with such ferocity during a performance of Don Pasquale that the tenor singing his first aria could hardly be heard and the performance had to pause after he’d finished while the stage was mopped and swabbed down; and in Ariadne auf Naxos Bacchus had a spectacular arrival, by boat, at Opera, May 2019 557

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■  Garsington Opera in the pavilion at Wormsley: Vivaldi’s ‘La verità in cimento’

unpredictable—a cloud comes over and it changes completely. I think of everything I can do to make the set sympathetic to natural light, which is why I tend to use a lot of texture. What we have to do in order to allow for those variations is to light for no light, as it were. Even if the opera starts in clear natural light we always create a basic lighting state. In good weather you wouldn’t need to light those early scenes, but if it clouds over, people have to be able to see.’

What this also means for a creative team is that they are obliged, before the show opens, to have their technical lighting sessions late at night because they have to wait for darkness before they can start. ‘It can be pretty miserable,’ admits Duncan. ‘Everyone else goes home and you sit there, wrapped in layers and freezing cold, working your way through the lighting plot. There was one horrible occasion at Opera Holland Park when there was a student on the lighting board who accidentally lost all the cues. The computer just wiped itself because he hadn’t programmed it properly and we had to go back and start all over again. We didn’t finish till past two in the morning by which time, even though the management had organized taxis to take us home, the park gates were locked. We had to climb over these huge railings and I remember having a complete sense of humour failure and thinking, “Would Sir Peter Hall do this? He would not!”’

The mention of freezing cold does bring up another issue for outdoor opera performances: the unpredictability of summer weather. At Garsington Manor, during performances of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the particularly small and slender soprano Rebecca Bottone, singing the role of Tytania, grew so cold in her fairy bower as she waited to be awoken by Oberon that the stage crew were obliged to slip a hot water bottle between her sheets; the rain lashed down with such ferocity during a performance of Don Pasquale that the tenor singing his first aria could hardly be heard and the performance had to pause after he’d finished while the stage was mopped and swabbed down; and in Ariadne auf Naxos Bacchus had a spectacular arrival, by boat, at

Opera, May 2019

557

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