DIE ZAUBERFLÖTE
‘I don’t understand people who dismiss fairy tales,’ says Renaud Doucet. ‘After all, what is a fairy tale? It’s a story that teaches people how to live; it’s about initiation, adventure, self-discovery.’
Since they joined forces in 2000, Franco-Canadian director-designer duo André Barbe and Renaud Doucet have become synonymous with a certain kind of production. ‘Quirky’, ‘colourful’ and ‘larger than life’ are descriptions that come up again and again in reviews. ‘It’s as though we’ve been put in a box labelled “fairy tales and grand spectacles,”’ Doucet explains with a shrug, ‘but there’s so much more to these pieces than that.’
Looking through the team’s back-catalogue it’s easy to see how it happened. La Cenerentola, Cendrillon, Rusalka, Die Feen, The Sound of Musicand a now cult production of Turandot - the list is dominated by fantasies and fairy tales, stories that, if they don’t always end happily ever after, all share an element of ‘Once upon a time…’
One opera that is notably absent – or has been, until now – is Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, a work they have turned down on three separate occasions over the past 20 years. ‘It’s an opera that has been offered to us since the very start,’ says Doucet. ‘Everyone kept telling us that it was the perfect piece for us, but much as we love the music we found the libretto deeply problematic – sexist and racist. There are well-established difficulties with the text and often, instead of facing them, directors just take them out; but then it’s not Die Zauberflöte. We felt strongly that we either had to find a way to justify and embrace everything, to be truthful to both the music and the text, or not to stage the piece at all.’
So what changed? Research into the work’s Viennese origins led the directors to the city’s famous Hotel Sacher and its pioneering young proprietor Anna Sacher. ‘After her husband’s death everyone expected and tried to persuade her to give up the hotel, but she didn’t, explains Barbe. ‘Despite everyone telling her that a woman could never do the job she did it, and better than any of her male rivals.’
Rosa Lewis – owner and cook of London’s Cavendish Hotel, mistress of Edward VII and inspiration for the BBC series The Duchess of Duke Street – was another model for a hotel-based production whose starting point is not the plucky young lovers Tamino and Pamina, but the more ambiguous figure of the Queen of the Night.
‘The problem’ says Doucet, ‘is that she is always portrayed as a bitch, and that’s simply not interesting. If somebody acts violently or cruelly you want to understand why, what has happened to trigger that behaviour?’ ‘When we were reading about Sacher and Lewis,’ adds Barbe, ‘we developed a real fondness for these women who were fighters and survivors in an era where everyone told them their dreams were impossible. It took a lot of courage to fight back, and that led us to feel a real sympathy for the Queen of the Night, which we didn’t want to lose. In our production we connect her story to the broader theme of women’s rights, and to the suffrage movement that was spreading across the world at this point in history.
‘It’s an important time to be exploring these ideas. I was in Lewes for last year’s Bonfire Night parade. There were women dressed up as suffragettes carrying placards that read “Nothing has changed since 1919”. I think we all realise that there’s still a lot of work to be done. There are many passages and lines in Die Zauberflöte that are usually cut, but we kept all we could because sexism is an important counterpoint within the piece. It’s the reason why the women fight for power. We wanted to keep those contrasts. Theatre is about reaction; you need to have something to kick against’.
The setting for the directors’ Flute may be domestic, but in true Barbe and Doucet style there’s nothing everyday about the visuals. ‘We had to find a way to ignite the energy of the piece,’ says designer Barbe. ‘Die Zauberflöte is a big, Broadway musical, it has to have a “wow” quality, an impact. You never want your audience to stop being amazed. But it’s a challenge to achieve. There are 11 different sets – how do you manage that, especially for a show that has to tour?’
The duo found the answer in the work’s original staging at Vienna’s suburban Theater auf der Wieden – a venue for popular drama and dance as well as opera, and well known for visual spectacle and sensation. ‘We felt that the only way we could do so many set changes was with painted drops [cloths]. There’s a long tradition of these in opera, from Mozart’s day right up to David Hockney, and it felt like the right moment to revisit the idea.’
The result is a series of intricate black and white scene paintings, meticulously hand-drawn by Barbe himself – monochrome backdrops that will support rather than rival the opera’s colourful cast of characters, and nod to the Masonic symbolism that is so central to Mozart’s score. ‘All the opera’s original symbols are there if you want to look for them,’ says Doucet. ‘But we didn’t want the production just to be about Freemasonry. If all you do as a director is underline the symbols then it becomes just a thesis. Our production has many layers; you can just sit back and enjoy the spectacle and sensation, or you can look more closely and find many more ideas.’
Barbe and Doucet, who are life partners as well as professional ones, have worked exclusively together now for almost two decades. It’s an unusual and completely collaborative set-up - Doucet takes the lead on direction and choreography, while Barbe drives the design - and one they credit with their success. ‘We are very demanding of each other,’ says Barbe. ‘The process never gets any easier because we each know exactly what the other is capable of, and always push one another to equal or exceed that level.’
‘It’s never about finding an artistic compromise,’ Doucet insists. ‘Compromise is always a lose-lose. A good concept is one you don’t have to compromise on, don’t have to force. Our goal is to create a bridge between the audience and the stage, to invite them into the drama and give them a moment completely outside their normal life and experience.’