"Let's do the show right here"

Classical Music, Interview and Feature

It is a brave opera company that lets in the tv cameras - as the Royal Opera discovered to its cost some years ago. But Opera Anywhere, a small company with big ambitions, has few regrets. Nicola Lisle reports.

If you have been following the Channel documentary series Get Your Act Together, currently showing on Tuesday evenings, then you will have seen the recent episode featuring Opera Anywhere, in which this small-scale Oxfordshire touring company was given a bit of a mauling. But Mike Woodward, who co-founded the company in 2000 with wife Vanessa, is surprisingly upbeat about the experience.

'I feel very positive about the programme.' he insists. 'Obviously it hurts because it's taking the mickey out of us. But it's funny and entertaining and I do like making people laugh. It was such good fun to do, and it was a fantastic training experience.'
Opera Anywhere's mission has always been to take opera to the places normally bypassed by larger-scale companies, and introduce opera to a wider audience. As its name suggests, it is willing to perform anywhere. The first concert was on a stage erected over a pond - an experiment that proved so successful it was repeated for the Golden jubilee in 2002 and also in 2005. The company regularly tours village halls, small theatres, churches, stately homes and, most recently, the newly opened Oxford Castle. Its repertoire ranges from pantomime to rarely performed chamber operas, with a bit of Gilbert and Sullivan thrown in for good measure.

Last year, the company started to spread its wings a little, taking in concerts at Sherborne Castle in Dorset and Cheltenham Pump Room, and there are plans to travel even further afield in the future.

'We're fairly ambitious,' says Woodward, in what seems like a massive understatement. So when Channel 4 approached him about becoming the subject of a fly-on-the wall documentary, and taking advice from entrepreneur Harvey Goldsmith (best known as the promoter of Live Aid and Live 8), he leapt at the opportunity, even if it did involve allowing a team of cameramen to follow the company around for six months - something that Woodward admits was 'very stressful'. But was it worth it? Despite Woodward's upbeat response to the programme, he was disappointed at some of the negative representation.

'They did something really naughty at the beginning when they were filming opera scenes at Oxford Castle during the summer. One scene was from Cosi fan tutte, which we tried to present as Star Trek. That was hard to get across because it was a tricky ensemble. It worked at the Jacqueline du Pre Building in Oxford a few weeks earlier, but outside at the castle it didn't seem to gel at all. And that's what they showed.
'But what they did that was very naughty was they had an audience view of people leaving, and they matched them leaving at the interval to that scene. So they did misrepresent. And all the good stuff that was going on they didn't pick up on at all.
'But that's the point of the programme - the first half showing how bad we were, the second half how things could be really good if we got our act together.'

One of the things the programme focused on was Opera Anywhere's controversial new production of Don Giovanni, which has been updated to an investment banking environment in the 1990's, and given a new translation by lawyer- turned singer/librettist Anna Pelly. With sex and bad language featuring in the reinvention of Mozart's classic opera, it was perhaps inevitable that it would ruffle a few feathers, but Pelly is unrepentant.

'I think some people will hate it,' she admits, 'but it was not done to shock gratuitously. I've only used bad language in situations that I think people would use it in. What I've been trying to do is create modern people, who are familiar, so that it makes the shock value of the opera real. It's a shocking opera because Don Giovanni is a shocking guy and I think it's easy to forget that. It's important to see what a bad man he is.

'Don Giovanni was a shocking opera when it was written - it was a very social comment at the time, and I'm sure the strata of society would have seen it and been interested in it. So I suppose I'm trying to bring it back more to how it was originally.'
Pelly's inspiration for resetting the opera in a City environment came largely from her own experiences of working as a lawyer in London throughout the 1990's. 'Ithink the character of the Don was terribly familiar to me - I felt I had met Don Giovanni in the City! There's a lot of very charismatic, very mega-energy sort of people there, which I think tends to go with the sexual energy of the opera. There's also some pretty ruthless sort of people. So I think the two just seemed together terribly well'.

'The problem I have with updated operas is that it doesn't always ring true. How do you replicate the sort of difference in power between the aristocracy and the peasantry in the 18th century? How do you put it into modern-day terms so that it's believable? Why would Masetto just say okay, take my woman? It just doesn't ring true'.

'So it seemed to me that the City was a place where this would work, where there are these real divisions. Don Giovanni threatens Masetto with a P45, for example, and if Masetto loses his job he loses his cheap mortgage, which means he loses his flat, which is part of what he's got to offer Zerlina. He really does lose everything if he doesn't go along Don Giovanni. So it seemed a good setting for it, to try and make it believable.'
Pelly sang extensively during her late teens and early twenties, but it wasn't until she left her job in the City in the late 1990's to start a family that she rediscovered opera, and became passionate about sharing it with people who may not have experienced it before. Updating classical operas is, for her, a way of achieving that.

'I became quite evangelical about it. I'd forgotten how passionate opera is. It's all about love and sex and hate - they're very real people. So I wanted other people to share this experience of discovering how wonderful it is, and how much it is about us, even though it was written 300 years ago.

'Also - and I think this is why the Channel 4 programme fastened on to it a bit - opera is a bit of a sacred cow, I think. If you go to opera it shows you're a respectable person. But I feel that it's very much about human beings and by having it slightly wrapped in cotton wool it shuts it off to most of the population. I wanted to put it more on a par with film, so that a whole new audience would discover it, as I did, and be excited by it.'

The other main event featured in the documentary was also designed to broaden opera's appeal - the unique Arias on Ice, which took place at Canary Wharf in February and saw Opera Anywhere regulars singing alongside opera star Alfie Boe and a team of international ice skaters.

'It was absolutely spectacular, right in the middle of all these fantastic buildings,' Woodward recalls. 'We had some skating lessons from Robin Cousins, so that was part of the film, seeing us floundering around trying to skate! He also choreographed it all. The meeting of opera and ice skating, in that setting, sent shivers down your spine - it was wonderful, really, just awesome. The ice skaters themselves were so moved, and they were people who hadn't been exposed to opera before. Dancing to classical music really touched them; they were so uplifted and inspired.'

So what's next for Opera Anywhere? Don Giovanni opens in Oxford in May, but plans for touring the production have, for the moment, been shelved, largely due to the costs involved. Instead, Woodward hopes to attract interest in the production from festival organisers for 2008. In the meantime, the company is reviving its successful double bill of Walton's The Bear and Berkeley's The Dinner Engagement, as well its Proms on the Pond in the summer. But the future seems to lie with projects like Arias on Ice.

'Harvey Goldsmith thinks that's the future for us, in terms of how we sustain a long-term business,' says Woodward. 'So one of the things we'll hopefully do is a national tour of ice rinks in the autumn. It will be similar to the Canary Wharf show, but there's lots of things we can do to improve it. We want to make it really fabulous.'

Nicola Lisle, April 2007, Classical Music