Opera NZ's staging of Macbeth revamps Shakespeare's tragedy about a deranged couple dragging each other to destruction, director Tim Albery tells William Dart.
NBR New Zealand Opera's Macbeth, which opens next week, impressed critics when the production was first mounted by Opera North two years ago.
"A fast vivid, bloody and energetic Macbeth that grabs and keeps the audience's attention" was the Telegraph's verdict; "thoughtful and penetrating," chimed in the Independent, "absorbed by the enthralled audience in pin-drop silence".
Would one have expected anything less from director Tim Albery, a man who has undertaken major productions for European and American companies from Royal Opera House and Netherlands Opera to Santa Fe and the inevitable Met?
Albery clearly relishes the whole operatic process, "working with a given canvas, however different it might be in the hands of a different conductor. It's a pre-existing thing and your job is to deconstruct it and go back to its essence and then put it together again".
Despite working with what might seem a rigidly structured musical score, "there is still an incredible amount of choices to make," he explains.
"It's a matter of deciding what the music is doing and then work out a way how best to express it. I find that challenge quite interesting."
He is nervous about the word "relevant" being bandied about.
"It's just a matter of how best to tell the story," is the simple answer. "Shakespeare's story is timeless. It's not real, it's not set in Scotland. Who cares what the costumes are? You just need to come to grips with a primal tale of self-destruction."
Verdi has helped here. "The opera has been so pared back from the original Shakespeare.
"In the play you spend a lot of time in Macbeth's head while this essentially good man tortures himself in a state of moral chaos.
"You get a lot more involved with Lady Macbeth in the opera and it all feels very much the story of a couple who drag each other to destruction.
"They're two deranged people, long past understanding why they're behaving like they do."
Albery has no problem at all with Verdi having slashed out "all the English stuff with Macduff and Malcolm which is also pretty tricky in the play. You just want to get back to the main action", helped in the opera by "the incredibly furious drive of Verdi's music". Italian Antonia Cifrone played Lady Macbeth in Leeds two years ago and received rave notices. In Auckland she is joined by Romanian bass Michele Kalmandi as her biddable spouse while Russian tenor Roman Shulackoff, a stirring Lensky in last year's Eugene Onegin, takes the heroic tenor role of Macduff.
"I'm not a believer in the old cliche that opera singers can't act," says Albery. "For those of us who see opera as theatre, it is so refreshing that Verdi wanted singers who had the right voice for the part rather than just the right voice - a great dramatic voice that can be embodied in a wonderful performance."
While this production is comparatively low budget and lean in the scenery department, Albery feels this is perhaps a dramatic advantage.
"The serious flow of the narrative might have been harder to sustain if we'd been compelled to find scenery," he says.
These are hard times for a much-threatened art form.
"You spend an awful lot of time cutting, cutting, cutting and sometimes the budget is cut back as you're working on the show," Albery sighs.
"But then I've been with companies like the Met where they don't mention budget but just tell you to go away and design it."
His productions of Britten's Peter Grimes and Billy Budd for English National Opera, from 1988 and 1994 respectively, were made at a time when the BBC was "filming so much that was being done".
Both productions are available on DVD and represent what he feels is his finest work. He enthuses over the late tenor Philip Langridge, who gave "a major performance" as Captain Vere in Billy Budd and played against expectations "presenting Grimes in a fantastic wiry, skinny way".
Most recently Albery has been associated with Rufus Wainwright, directing the singer's operatic debut, Prima Donna, on both sides of the Atlantic. It has been a happy partnership with the Canadian singer, who has "an incredible drive and enormous charm under that dishevelled, I-just-got-up look".
I am told to be wary of the uncharitable press notices that filtered out after the opera's Manchester premiere last year. "It got patronised by a lot of the press and to some extent inevitably.
"It's not avant-garde, it's not pushing boundaries, it's not in any way challenging musically. There's a lot of tunes in it.
"Basically it inhabits the sound work of the late 19th and early 20th centuries because Rufus was deliberately paying homage to the operas he listened to as a youth. But there are not many first operas that make such a good night in the theatre."
Performance
What: NBR New Zealand Opera's Macbeth by Verdi
Where and when: Aotea Centre, opens Saturday September 18 at 7.30pm; Thursday September 23 and Saturday September 25 at 7.30pm; Tuesday September 21 at 6.30pm
