Barrie Kosky: the stereotype of the malicious opera director is dangerous

Barrie Kosky is one of the most distinctive directors working in opera. His 2011 production of Castor and Pollux found a homo-erotic subtext in Rameau’s baroque music drama, and featured plentiful amounts of onstage nudity. His visually inventive Magic Flute, which goes to the Edinburgh Festival this year, is more  immediately crowd-pleasing. So what does he have in store for the Glyndebourne audience, with his new production of Handel’s oratorio Saul?

“All my productions are different,” Kosky tells me during a break in rehearsals. “I’ve done operetta, I’ve done musicals, comedies, the spectrum of my work is very, very diverse.” In this Saul, he says, “there’s nothing offensive, nothing provocative and outrageous. It’s an attempt to put this fantastic story and this wonderful score on stage.” Handel's piece tells the Old Testament story of the rivalry between the King of Israel, Saul, and the Goliath-slaying David. Kosky says he much prefers Handel’s oratorios to his operas. “The operas contain wonderful arias, strung together like a string of exquisite pearls, but they never hold together—they’re such hard work. I find it very difficult to sit through four hours of Da capo. In the oratorios, because Handel created this theatre in his mind—the story and the narrative are so much stronger than the operas... The emotional landscapes are more complex. The musical structure of the score is also more radical—what Handel did with key changes, with orchestra texture.”

Kosky has opera in his blood. The Australian, born in 1967, first went to the opera when he was seven years old. He was taken to Madame Butterfly in Melbourne by his Hungarian grandmother—“she was an opera freak,” he tells me—and by the time he was 18, he had already seen 200 operas, including works such as Janáek’s Kátya Kabanová and Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. “My puberty and my adolescence were accompanied by Wagner, Mozart and Janáek,” he says.

He saw a huge variety of productions, from the traditional to the radical. “I think I saw Joan Sutherland in about 15 different productions—that was one end of the spectrum. But there were also interesting productions, lots of contemporary dance, international theatre.” He saw the dancer Pina Bausch perform, and she and others came to influence his formative years. He reacted against what he saw as the “mainstream, text-based theatre that had been inherited from the English tradition.” He says bluntly: “Whenever I saw a well-made play, or most Shakespeare productions… I was bored shitless. I still am.”

Kosky works in the heavily subsidised German theatre as the Chief Director at the Komische Oper in Berlin, where there is a tradition of challenging the audience with experimental productions. I ask him what he makes of the brouhaha over the gang-rape scene in the Royal Opera House’s recent production of Rossini’s William Tell. “What was outrageous about it was that there have been far more outrageous things on the opera stage in the last 20 years. The director Damiano Michieletto is a very fine, talented director, who is one of the rare directors who do respond to the musical language and so to portray him as some dilettante and provocateur is scandalous.”

He carries on: “I’m trying still to work out what exactly the fuss was about—was it that there was a flash of nudity? Was it that there was a rape scene in an opera that people didn’t think should be there? That you can’t do that on stage? Was it because the music was 'happy soldiers' and there was something horrible and unhappy happening?” The booing that greeted the scene on its first night is, he believes, dangerous for the art form. “I think it plays into all the worst elements of a traditional opera audience. Some believe that because they’ve paid a lot of money for a ticket what happens on stage has to reflect exactly their lifestyle or their projected ideal of a lifestyle they want. It’s very dangerous.

“The most dangerous thing is the stereotype of these evil, malicious, uncaring, unthinking, unmusical directors launching at attack on this sacred, holy, operatic ritual. This is yawn-making, I’m sorry.”

It can sometimes seem like opera directors and opera audiences are locked in mutual antagonism. With a small repertoire of works to play with, directors naturally feel they need to make an artistic statement with every new production; audiences, on the other hand, have become wary of stagings that in their mind do violence to the composer’s intentions. Kosky tells me he’s not interested in doing something different for its own sake: “It’s the easiest thing in the world to provoke a premiere audience…the easiest thing in the world.”

Recent government spending cuts has meant opera funding is under threat in this country, something Kosky has strong views on. “What I find distressing is that culture becomes disposable or that if people want to see it they can just pay for it. That works spectacularly in the case of Glyndebourne, but Glyndebourne is a festival that happens a few months of the year, that came out of a very specific time and place, and is very extraordinary for what it is but it’s not going to work in London.”

He continues: “It is an expensive art form. It’s never going to appeal to everybody but it’s a very important part of the fabric of English culture.” If opera does become more reliant on private money it will be interesting to see whether the productions will become more commercially friendly, as they tend to be in the unsubsidised United States. It doesn’t have to be a battle between audience and director, though: the best productions are ones that satisfy you both emotionally and intellectually. Which is what Kosky is surely aiming for with Saul.

Barrie Kosky’s new production of Handel’s Saul opens on 23rd July. Before the 20th August production, Prospect is holding a debate “Taking on the Bible.” Click here for details