Dramaturgy and Aeneas: Robert Hersey @ Edinburgh Studio Opera

Director Robert Hersey | Musical Director William Conway | Producer Samantha Redfern

Join Edinburgh Studio Opera in their 50th year producing the highest quality student opera in Edinburgh with a double bill of beautifully reimagined and restaged classics. Journey from Virgil’s tragic love affair, Dido & Aeneas, to a hilarious comical farce forged in the fires of Dante’s inferno, Gianni Schicchi. Expect an immersive and exciting evening in one of Edinburgh’s most charming venues.

What was the inspiration for this performance?For me, my approach to creativity in general is this: there is no point in recreating something which has been directed and recreated on stage many times without having something new to say. Be it through the staging, reimagining narratives, the use of space itself, reimagining the performer-audience relationship… In these productions, I wanted to firstly challenge certain operatic performance conventions. 

By staging the operas in a traverse staging, you essentially take away the safety net of the conductor and orchestra set in front of the performer. It frees performers to communicate directly and in close proximity to the audience. This throws up certain challenges for the singers, but completely releases an energy in performance which is dynamic and exciting for both performers and audience. 

As well as this, in Dido & Aeneas, I have tried reimagining the narrative to explore some of the burning issues I see in today’s media and society more generally. These include issues of sexuality and gender, the objectification of women in the media and film, and the sexual predation of woman in the media industry. I wanted to up turn the audience expectations and create new energies and talking points.

Is performance still a good space for the public discussion of ideas?Yes absolutely - but, if we just view performance as entertainment and it sticks to clearly defined norms and expectations, there is certainly little to incline us to sit in bars afterwards and see any need for discussion or debate. Theatre has to tell the stories that need telling and in a way that only live theatre can.

How did you become interested in making performance?I trained first as a musician and a singer and quickly found a love for performance and theatre. I inherited a visual imagination from my artist Dad I think. I also trained at the School of the Science of Acting. 

Their founder and artistic director, a controversial figure in the London theatre world, always pushed us to ask more and more questions about our intentions in performance and what theatre was and could be. I have worked a lot of my life with young people finding their unfettered energy, imagination and non-conformity essential in creating theatre. It informs me still.

Is there any particular approach to the making of the show?The demands of staging both operas in the traverse, like an oyster, creates a certain restriction but generates creative possibilities which have been exciting. The time restraints of rehearsals have put some limitations to my normal rehearsal practice of much experimentation within rehearsal time. It has made me create the whole process within my imagination and then on stage. 

I’m then working backwards, as it were, taking that part of the approach and letting the actors/singers into the process for them to regain a creative foothold and ownership of operas. Both operas have demanded a very physical theatre and movement approach to staging. This puts enormous demands on the singers but they have worked very hard to master new skills and create dynamic stage picture on stage.

Does the show fit with your usual productions?Yes, both operas fit within my usual style but, of course, each new work demands a new approach. For me, it’s so important not to get complacent or to somehow impose interpretation without first working from the inside, really finding something fundamental that moves and excites you.  

What do you hope that the audience will experience?A sense of excitement at being so close, within touching distance of operatic singers in full flow. 

To feel a cathartic sense of tragedy at the end of Dido & Aeneas and to be shocked and challenged through the new narrative of the piece, especially the relationship between Dido and Belinda but also the predatory nature of Aeneas. In Gianni Schicchi, which many will not have seen before, especially never in this traverse staging, I hope the audience feels completely taken into the middle of the fast, furious and hilarious narrative of this absurd comic masterpiece.

Under the imaginative direction of Robert Hersey, the 27-strong cast will be performing in traverse, using the length of the stage to a create dynamic and fluid piece of opera. With a backdrop of 1950s Italy, Hersey’s retelling blends the glitzy world on a film set with the colourful home life of a band of cruel relatives. Recently hailed a “tour de force”, returning Musical Director Will Conway will expertly conduct the orchestra bringing with him “a flair for the unpredictable”.


Assembly Roxy, 2 Roxburgh Place, Edinburgh, EH8 9SU



Tuesday 27th February @ 7.30pm Wednesday 28th March @ 7.30pm Friday 2nd March @ 7.30pm Saturday 3rd March @ 7.30pm

Highlights from ESO50: A Concert Performance – Saturday 3rd March @ 2.00pm





Tickets £15 | Concessions £12 | Students £6.50 www.edinburghstudioopera.org

Claudia Molitor: A Good Memory

Within the extensive programme of Sonica, Claudia Molitor stands out not only due to her background a composer - alongside a cohort of visual artists and musicians coming from an electronic tradition - but because the scale of her Remember Me is more modest than spectacular. "In a time when 'big', 'more', 'hi-...' are often considered better and more exciting," she says. "There is, for me, a desire to counterbalance this and focus on the smaller, the neglected, the less audible and visible." While she draws on the stories of opera - imagining a friendship between the classical tragic victims Dido and Eurydice - she has pinned her multi-media opera inside a desk, at Scotland Street School Museum.

"This piece tries to draw the listener-spectator into a sonic space where small sounds become big events, where the senses are heightened to hear what we might usually miss," Molitor continues. "I am fascinated with the way that we can occupy ourselves in a world with trials and tribulations and great big events and ideas (like in an opera) with only a pencil and paper, a made up song or a few toys when we are children." Taking her cue from this, Molitor condensed the grand themes into a tiny space. " So miniaturist on the surface yes, but still with all the big ideas and ideals!"

Remember Me also stands out in the festival programme as one of two pieces - the other is Bluebeard - that explicitly connects to opera, the original "total art" that, at the turn of the nineteenth century, was seen as an integrative performance to include all of the other arts. There's a a clear line from that vision of opera to Cathie Boyd's vision for Sonica, although whereas last time, it ended up with Wagner, the scope of Cryptic's festival offers more intimate works with equally lofty ambitions.

Molitor expands. "Themes in opera are of course grand and big and tragic, they seem hyper-real, but then those themes touch all our lives, because essentially opera is always a reflection of the way society understands itself at any given time, in any given socio-political or cultural situation. It reflects on the way people relate to and interact with each other. Of course on the opera stage this is highly stylised, but then it is in my work too, but in a very different way." 

Yet the scale of Remember Me, and even the original inspiration - the gift of an antique from Molitor's grandmother - insist that this is a far more personal performance than a grand-standing comment on these socio-political situations. Her heroines may have been victims in their stories, but art has given them a grandeur and sympathy. "They are very different, but what they both have in common is that they are defined by very specific roles in their respective stories," she comments,

"In terms of music and opera I see a connection when looking at two arias: Dido's Lament in Purcell's opera is one of the most well known operatic arias where Dido laments her absent lover Aeneas, who is travelling the seas; Orpheus' lament for Eurydice, lost to him to the Underworld after she has been bitten by a snake, in Gluck's opera is a similarly celebrated aria," she adds. "These two laments to me highlight how the female voice in opera and, in turn, in society exists in relation to the male, rarely on its own terms. This is an important aspect of opera, where the most fantastical arias are often sung by the female voice, but that female element is more often than not the aspect that has unsettled the status quo, which by the end of the opera is re-established often by the death of the heroine." 

Like many a student reading The Aeneid at sixteen, realising how unfairly Dido is being treated both by the author Virgil and her lover Aeneas, Molitor hopes to save Dido. Unlike the student, however, she has not approached this by becoming a Latin teacher before realising his vocation was in criticism. "In a way, that's what Remember Me proposes, a construction of a space where this female voice can enter on her own terms... an alternative “ending” for Dido and Eurydice." 

Remember Me more than embodies Sonica's tagline of "sonic art for the visually minded": it speaks to wider concerns about both how performance is consumed, deliberately avoiding the fashion for the monumental - perhaps often visible in the work of Scottish theatre companies - while seriously considering the way that art can both reveal historical perspectives, in this case about women, and then address them and look towards change.  

Scotland Street School, 8, 14, 15 November. Various times