Cast members of The Unruly Tourists with director Thomas de Mallet Burgess (right). Photo / Dean Purcell.
New Zealand Opera’s upcoming production of The Unruly Tourists has become the most buzzed-about opera in living memory. Greg Bruce goes inside the opera wars.
Englishman Thomas de Mallet Burgess had been in the country only a few months when the story exploded across Takapuna Beach and – over the next few breathless weeks – the country. A group of tourists refused to clean up their litter on Takapuna Beach, a small child told a local, “I’ll knock your brains out”, and soon we could talk about nothing else. De Mallet Burgess found the story absurd and poignant and surreal, was fascinated and uncomfortable and was glued to it like a soap opera. He had arrived in the country with a remit to ensure the survival of New Zealand Opera, and the more he saw of the unruly tourists, the more he came to believe they might help him fulfil that remit.
Later that year he was in bed, watching an episode of Funny As: The Story of New Zealand Comedy, when he saw an interview with Kiwi musical comedy duo The Fan Brigade. Intrigued, he googled them, watched a song of theirs about the importance of signing in when visiting the RSA, and became convinced they were the people to write it.
Once he had the story and the writers, it was just a matter of time before all hell broke loose. The saga of the unruly tourists was about to become the saga of The Unruly Tourists.
I met de Mallet Burgess and The Fan Brigade – Livi Reihana and Amanda Kennedy – in the rehearsal room at NZ Opera’s headquarters in Parnell a few weeks ago. Although it was more than a year since news of The Unruly Tourists opera had blown up, it was far from blown over.
Kennedy said they’re planning a party for the morning after opening night, which is still four months away, to read the negative reviews: “I would not be surprised to hear people saying we’ve destroyed New Zealand’s reputation for opera,” she said. “There’s just so much hyperbole.
“A lot of people have been very welcoming but some have really been not and that is reasonably shocking to me. I’m like, ‘What’s your problem, sorry?’”
After the production was first announced, NZ Opera’s head of music, Lindy Tennent-Brown, who has since resigned, described the idea as a “waste of funding”.
One of New Zealand’s most internationally successful singers Simon O’Neill told RNZ: “This is using precious taxpayer money, which could be used better elsewhere in our art form. The new director has promised reimagination of the opera and he is not delivering that at all.”
Three of New Zealand Opera’s board resigned in the weeks after the opera’s announcement, although one of them, Witi Ihimaera, later told RNZ their letter of resignation mentioned neither The Unruly Tourists nor grievances with de Mallet Burgess.
“We resigned because one of our jobs as governors is to mitigate risk to the reputation of the company,” Ihimaera said, “and what I saw was a huge upswelling of discontent and confusion about the artistic direction of the company.
“So it was alarming [and] there was a flashpoint that we reached as governors, where we realised that there was no opportunity for us to be able to work as governors any longer.”
Things came full circle in the toilets at half-time in last year’s New Zealand Opera production of The Marriage of Figaro. Kennedy says: “I’m sitting there taking a piss and listening to these women bitching about our opera: ‘You heard about that tourist thing? How ridiculous! It doesn’t need to be made!’”
Livi Reihana, the other half of The Fan Brigade says, “It was the funniest s***. We don’t care. It’s gonna sell out.”
During a promotional interview on television show The Project last year, Reihana upset some people, including some members of NZ Opera, including some of the performers, by saying she wouldn’t want to sit through an opera in Italian.
De Mallet Burgess replied to Reihana: “Richard Wagner said exactly the same thing about why he was writing his work in German and not in another language like Italian – because he wanted people to receive the work. You had come to the same conclusion as a lot of other people who would now be considered opera greats.”
Reihana said: “I don’t have to like opera for three hours in Italian. That’s okay. Someone was like, ‘We work hard on those operas, and learning all those lines.’ I’m like, ‘That’s okay. Meryl Streep works really hard on all her movies. I don’t have to like them all.’”
Kennedy told another story about an opera event at which someone asked what her favourite opera was. She said Phantom of the Opera, which was a joke, but the person she was talking to didn’t see it that way, and became “very upset” with Kennedy.
De Mallet Burgess recalled the conversation, which he had overheard. “I felt really ashamed actually,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” Kennedy said.
“Not of you, Amanda,” he said. “I felt very ashamed about opera.”
He told a story about how, when he started working in opera in the United Kingdom in the early 1980s, he was doing community outreach work in chronically deprived areas. He would go into schools where kids couldn’t afford sports gear so would sometimes wear underpants instead.
“Seeing how opera and the characters, narrative and the music, could influence people who had no access to it, was fantastic. But it required a real openness to any question that came up. You just can’t adopt a position of knowledge and arrogance because that’s the very thing that keeps people out of it, keeps people away from it, makes people think that it’s not for them, that it’s only for people who are very wealthy, who are very white, who are very whatever. So that moment, which I overheard, was really difficult for me.”
But when talking about the appeal of The Fan Brigade, he spoke not about the need for openness and inclusivity, but that he saw in their amusing ditty about the RSA the qualities necessary to write a good opera.
“In order to write a libretto for opera,” he said, “you have got to be really, really precise and conscientious, and work and rework material. And it occurred to me, and it was later backed up in our conversation, that that’s exactly what these two do. However simple that tune with the ukulele, it was theatre. And I thought that’s what opera is and that’s what this opera needs to be, first and foremost – it needs to be theatre.
“I thought, ‘I’ll contact them.’ So I contacted you guys and you were sitting there thinking, ‘What the hell?’”
Reihana: “I hadn’t been to a single opera.”
Kennedy: “I’d been to a couple with my mum, who’s a big opera fan, but it wasn’t a big hobby of mine.”
Reihana: “We immediately googled you because we get all sorts of requests from all sorts of people and we were like, ‘Oh, he really is the director of New Zealand Opera.’”
He invited them to DeBrett’s for a drink and the upshot of that was their commissioning to write The Unruly Tourists, and the upshot of that was the greatest surge of public interest in opera in this country in a generation.
How many tickets will be sold on the power of the title alone? When the production was announced in 2021, Reihana says, many people failed to read beyond the headlines, which were along the lines of, “The family is back.” The internet again came alive with the sound of tourist-related outrage.
“Every comment – because no one reads the article – they were like, ‘Why the f*** are they coming back?!’ ‘I’ll be waiting at the f***ing airport for them!’ ‘Send them to Huntly!’”
Kennedy says: “I remember reading comments from people in the one group that I was on at the time, going, ‘Send them to Porirua and see whose f***ing block gets knocked the f*** off.’
“I’m like, ‘You’re talking about a 7-year-old kid!’ I used to work in some reasonably tough schools as a teacher, and kids are little s***s, and they just kind of emulate what their parents do. It’s never the kids’ fault. How little kids behave is really not their fault. And everyone was just so venomous against this little kid.”
Reihana: “Including me. I would have absolutely tripped him up if I saw him.”
Kennedy: “Literally, people were going, ‘I want to f***ing kill that kid.’ It’s a child! We don’t do that, do we? Do we? Do we?”
Reihana: “You get caught up in the hype of the time. The hype had been gone for a year and a half or two years, and now we’re reading about it when there’s no hype around it and that’s when it’s jarring. Like, ‘What the f***?’”
Kennedy: “I don’t think anyone would have complained if we’d put them on a burning pyre.”
Reihana: “I was gripped the whole time. Thomas was like, ‘Do you remember the Facebook pages?’ I was like ‘Yes! I liked and followed them all.’ God, did I want to know where those scammers were going.”
Kennedy: “New Zealand was out of line. Everyone was out of line.”
Reihana: “I only felt like they were out of line. I was absolutely caught up in the hysteria of the media when it first happened. I was, like, ‘Yeah, we must stalk these families! God, I’m going to get in my car and bloody find them!’ Then, when we got into making it, I was like, ‘Oh, you know what? I think we went a bit too far, guys.’”
A lthough Kennedy and Reihana are the highly quotable, media-friendly, sometimes-controversial faces of The Unruly Tourists, they are just one part of a quite large creative team that also includes director de Mallet Burgess along with a composer, music director, dramaturg, designer, lighting designer, movement director, principal repetiteur, assistant movement director, dialect coach, tikanga adviser and two cultural advisers.
And then there are the performers, who they are in awe of. Kennedy describes their singing as “one of the most spine-chilling experiences”. Just listening to the cast warming up, she says, has brought tears to her eyes. She says the ability to hear and enjoy operatic singing “should be a human right”.
In a taxi on the way to our interview, she says, she twice rewatched Susan Boyle’s 2009 audition on Britain’s Got Talent, in which Boyle famously sang I Dreamed a Dream, from Les Miserables.
“Watching that audience going from ‘Pffft’ to ‘Oh my God!’ That’s what I think people will be like coming to watch opera for the first time.
“They’ll hear these incredible voices and they’ll just go, ‘F***, where was that all my life?’ That’s what I feel like. That’s what I feel audiences are going to be like. Hearing the operatic voices that we’ve heard in the rehearsals and in the workshops, I’ve never ceased to be blown away. It just is never going to stop moving me. We don’t just need to widen the audience to benefit New Zealand Opera and the opera industry, but for New Zealanders to be able to have that in their lives.”
American opera expert Dr Caitlin Vincent, a lecturer at the University of Melbourne, says the uproar over The Unruly Tourists is part of a worldwide phenomenon known as The Opera Wars – a battle between those who want to modernise opera and those who’d rather not. In 2019, she laid out some of her research and thoughts in an incendiary article for The Conversation, headlined: “Opera is stuck in a racist, sexist past, while many in the audience have moved on.”
Apart from her academic work, Vincent is also a former professional opera singer and librettist who once ran her own opera company.
Prior to 1900, she says, there were new operas all the time. It’s only over the last 120 years that the form has become stuck in the past, and the reason is that canonical works have attracted both audiences and broad support from boards of directors and donors. “They don’t want some weird new opera,” she says of the traditionalists. “They call it burp, chirp, fart music.”
The Unruly Tourists, she says, is a positive step for opera, supporting a living composer and living librettists and presenting a contemporary story that will appeal to new audiences.
“What is the role of opera?” she asks. “Is it meant to preserve the legacy of these historical works from the canon – Mozart, Puccini – and do it exactly the same, and essentially serve as a living museum?”
“Mozart is dead. Puccini is dead. They’re not producing anything else.”
Audiences are getting older, younger people are getting poorer and tickets are expensive, she says, and the idea of opera as non-English works written by non-living people is hindering its future.
“What’s the long game? Either you can get bums on seats or you can’t. Yet another Tosca and yet another Carmen? I love opera; I don’t need to see another Carmen.
“Opera is not a fixed thing. It is not something you put on a shelf. It’s a living, breathing thing.”
There are signs that the battle for the soul of NZ Opera might be turning in favour of the modernisers. Early ticket sales are strong and De Mallet Burgess says some of the people who were initially loudest in their opposition to The Unruly Tourists are now telling him they’re planning to come to see it. Just hours before our interview, he’d had “the most civilised conversation” with two benefactors, with whom he had earlier been involved in what he calls “an email trail of destruction”.
A few weeks earlier, Reihana and Kennedy had bumped into Simon O’Neill at a performance of NZ Opera’s production of Macbeth (two-and-a-half hours long, written 175 years ago, sung entirely in Italian).
Kennedy says: “He was like, ‘I’m so excited for this project,’ when originally he went on RNZ going, ‘This is atrocious. This is racist …’”
De Mallet Burgess: “I’d take that one with a pinch of salt.”
Kennedy: “He was very much like, ‘I’m really excited to see it and I think it’s actually a very interesting project, being able to have a think about it and hear more about it.’
“As you say, we can probably believe about 30 per cent of that.”
Reihana: “He also has to be nice to us because we said hello to him at the opera.”
Kennedy: “We hadn’t even met him and he was on the radio calling us racist and classist.”
Reihana: “He can’t do that to our face in real life when there’s two of us: ‘Hi Simon, it’s so nice to meet you!’”
De Mallet Burgess: “At a Verdi opera.”
Asked to comment on the show for this article, O’Neill replied by email: “I wish the Auckland Arts Festival, the cast and crew all the best for the performances.”
When de Mallet Burgess was first mulling over the idea of making an opera about the saga of the unruly tourists, he had a thought: “It occurred to me, very brutally and crudely, that a group of people from England coming over and trashing the country could be a metaphor for something.”
“Something like a group of people from England coming over and trashing the country?” Reihana asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Like, when did that happen?”
Early last month, it was announced that de Mallet Burgess has agreed to take up a position as artistic director of opera at the Finnish National Opera and Ballet. He will leave New Zealand in August, shortly after The Unruly Tourists.
The Unruly Tourists runs from March 23-26 at the Bruce Mason Centre, Takapuna.
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