Opera Theatre Company, now in its 20th year, is back in its favourite old haunt, Kilmainham Gaol, writes Arminta Wallace
One of my first experiences of opera in rehearsal took place on the University of Ulster's Magee campus in Derry in the early 1990s. The performance space was "atmospheric" - that is, church-like and high-ceilinged and very, very cold. Those of us who were watching sat with winter coats firmly buttoned. On stage, the soprano Joan Merrigan was perched on a bed, attired in either a nightdress or a pair of pyjamas - I can't remember. I remember the shoulder straps though: slender bootlace affairs that were all that stood between the singer and death by exposure. For more than two hours the director went back and forth through the score, sorting out the finer details of the performance. We sat shivering in our coats. Merrigan didn't shiver and she didn't complain. For anyone who - like me - had a romantic notion of opera as an airy-fairy sort of activity, it was a valuable lesson in the tough realities of the genre.
It was also, though I didn't realise it at the time, an object lesson in Opera Theatre Company's modus operandi. It wasn't that they deliberately set out to torture singers; it was that the play was the thing. As Merrigan told me afterwards, she was thrilled to get the opportunity to perform Poulenc's rarely-performed one-act opera La Voix Humaine, in which a woman has a telephone conversation with the lover who has just dumped her. And when you think of the kind of work that a small Irish touring opera company might produce, Poulenc's beautiful but searing monologue - emotionally demanding for both performer and audience - is not the sort of show that automatically springs to mind.
Opera Theatre Company was founded by director Ben Barnes, conductor Proinnsias Ó Duinn and the current acting general manger, Randall Shannon, as a touring company for the whole of Ireland. It first went on the road in 1984 with The Turn of the Screw, Benjamin Britten's spooky chamber piece; this month it celebrates its 20th anniversary with a production of Beethoven's Fidelio at Kilmainham Gaol. The list of operas it has produced in the interim runs to some 50 works. These include five new commissions, along with Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress; Peter Maxwell Davies's The Lighthouse; Mozart's Apollo and Hyacinthus and Britten's The Rape of Lucretia. Theres' a generous quantity of Haydn and Monteverdi, five Czech operas, including three by Janácek, and no fewer than six operas by Handel.
"Opera Theatre Company is true to its name," says Hugh Canning, opera critic of the Sunday Times. "It tries to present opera as theatre - and that's a crucial element, because you're going to get young singers, most of whom will look good in the parts. And they've been very, very adept at getting extremely good young Irish singers - and young British singers - over the years. One of the first OTC productions I saw was Handel's Flavio at the Gate Theatre; probably the best production of a Handel opera that I'd seen anywhere.
"For a company of that size to programme some of the very rare works that it has done - Handel, in particular, but also the first Irish performance of Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea, which is a fundamental work of the repertory but is not immediately obvious box office - is really quite remarkable."
EQUALLY REMARKABLE IS the company's relationship with, of all places, Kilmainham Gaol. The lack of a suitable venue for chamber opera in Dublin has forced OTC to come up with some innovative solutions over the years - of which Kilmainham is far and away the most overtly theatrical. For a piece such as Fidelio, with its masterly exploration of the theme of unjust imprisonment and its extraordinary portrayal of liberation, one could hardly find a more evocative setting - though it has its drawbacks. "One big bathroom, acoustically," is Randall Shannon's somewhat gloomy verdict.
But James Conway, who was artistic director, general manager and driving force behind OTC for 16 years - he is now artistic director at English Touring Opera - remembers the company's first production at Kilmainham as a major step forward in its artistic development. "Handel's Tamerlano in Kilmainham in 1992 was, I think, one of the great art events in Dublin ever, really," he says. "Certainly in all my time there. Dorothy Cross made beautiful sets, and we had a pretty uniformly wonderful cast." Ten years on, OTC's Kilmainham production of The Emperor of Atlantis, which was written in Terezin concentration camp in the 1940s, won the Irish Times/ESB award for best opera of 2002.
Clearly, working out how to get maximum theatrical impact from the Kilmainham acoustic has been a pretty energising process - which is perhaps why OTC has made it something of a habit to mount productions of a site-specific nature, from a late-night Weill cabaret show at the late, lamented Mother Redcap's to Pergolesi's Stabat Mater in a slate quarry on Valentia Island. But the real skill in the juggling act was to maintain a combination of experimental repertoire and unusual performance locations without losing money hand over fist.
This could only be done with the help of a loyal audience - people all over the country who go to an OTC production because it's by OTC, regardless of what the production might be.
Brendan Quinn, who lives in Enniscrone, Co Sligo, is a member of that public. "I usually feel confident with OTC that I'm going to enjoy the piece - feel good about it, as opposed to walking out with a disgruntled feeling," he says. Raised in various parts of the UK he was, he says, "bitten by the opera bug" during the 1970s and 1980s. He singles out last year's OTC's production of La Bohème for particular praise. "I've probably seen La Bohème 20 times, but it came to me as fresh then as when I'd seen it any other time - in fact, almost as if I'd seen it for the first time. They distilled the opera to the relationship between the main characters, took out a lot of the second act stuff, and it was intense and very, very moving. They don't try to replicate what you'd see in a big opera house - but they perform chamber opera to the highest standards."
HOW DID OTC build up such a strong relationship with Irish audiences? "I put it down to just taking your destiny in your hands and making no excuses," says Conway. "We were going to places where there wasn't any other opera - and so we didn't have to do the operas that people knew. It was great that we could go to Carrigallen and open Janácek's Jenufa. It was mad - but it was a great night. It was a great night when we did Katya Kabanova on Inis Oírr. When we did Handel in Ballyshannon, the nuns were offering sweets to the players and the orchestra. That sounds like I'm trying to cash in on the charm. I'm not. It was a real art experience - a real meeting of audiences. We met people who were working in amateur theatre who were smart as whips and really willing to tell you what they thought. Some of those morsels were pretty hard to digest - the work didn't always speak to people. But sometimes we let the wonderful, generous genius of those composers speak. Sometimes we did. And those were great, great nights."
But now it's back to the future - a tough time, in many ways, for a company with a successful past. "We're 20 years old now," says Randal Shannon. "The company isn't a baby any more. It's not even a teenager. Now we've got to become an adult; stand up and go out into the world."
The stakes have gone up considerably since those early days. Funding has gone up - but so have expectations. Many towns in Ireland have new and well-equipped theatres. In these days of multi-tasking and versatility on the part of arts organisations, says Shannon, OTC can no longer live by opera alone. "There's a whole spectrum of work available to an opera company," he says.
"The sharp point is the production of opera. That's why we exist. But besides that there's the work we can do in schools with young people - and with older people as well. The position of a performing organisation within society has changed completely. Once upon a time you could set yourself up as an opera company - or an orchestra, or a theatre - concentrate on the art, and expect the world to beat a path to your door. Nowadays everything is questioned. A performing body has to justify its existence; it also has to be a part of the community and give things back. We have a Young Associate Artists Programme where we select four young singers and work with them throughout the year. That could be expanded to work with more young singers, working alongside the Royal Irish Academy of Music, for example. We can also offer training to inexperienced singers, directors and designers.
"There's a whole lot that an opera company can do that isn't just singing opera. OTC has barely started to scratch the surface of that." Looks like another two busy decades ahead.
Opera Theatre Company will perform Fidelio in Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin, tonight and Sept 25, 27 and 29 at 7.30pm (pre- show talks tonight and Sept 25 and 29 at 6.45pm), tel: 01-8721122, www.opera.ie