It’s all up for grabs.
Director Adele Thomas has had a journey fuelled by curiosity. But with that, is the acknowledgment that success is fragile - “delicate as spun sugar”. She speaks of her own battles and barriers and invites us (and the industry) to take a risk. Read on…
It was the first day of tech when the pandemic shut us down.
I’d been making a psychedelic piece of music theatre for National Theatre Wales, site specifically located in a miner’s welfare hall in the valleys.
In the car on the way to the venue the choreographer, Associate Director and myself wondered how long into its full run the show would last. Three weeks? Two weeks?
By tea break, we wondered if it would play beyond its first weekend.
By lunch, we wondered if the show would ever see a live audience.
By dinner, we were closed before we’d even opened.
5 weeks rehearsal, 6 months of planning, a live band playing 27 songs, a 5 day fit up at the venue, over 150 costumes, 2 hours of amazing psychedelic animation, an entire team who learned to heal for the show. Gone.
It felt like standing next to an implosion. Next to negative space.
Of course there was no question: it was exactly the right thing to do. Of course the most important thing was to protect the health of the team and the potential audiences and no one was going to question the implementation of an effective public health strategy in an unprecedented time of crisis.
The strangeness of the climate in which the show was shut meant that there was no space to grieve or mourn the loss of all that work. We all just felt numb. The show became a ghost.
Making live art – opera or theatre – is an ephemeral and temporal endeavour at the best of times. Now, we’re all waking up to just how precarious the whole industry is in a stark and rather immediate way.
I am an opera director and I came to directing opera in a massively tangential way. I was raised in a working-class steel town in South Wales. My school had a “bare minimum” approach to the arts, but even that tiny chink of light was enough to set me on my way. I am horribly aware of the fact that that if I’d been of school age today, with arts education being eradicated from the curriculum, I would probably be working in the steel works.
The formative art education of my youth came mostly from obsessively watching MTV and the local rugby club panto. Music videos brought together what are still my favourite things: fantastic costumes, acting, dance and storytelling, ground-breaking visual art and, of course music. I would imagine whole narratives to my favourite albums and obsessively refine how I would realise them in performance. In my mind, that is, and in my bedroom.
The other big influence, the rugby club panto, was a four-hour long stagger through the vague plot points of a classic fairy story, packed with dance routines and songs, local in-jokes, a tanked-up audience and an even drunker cast. For a fiver you got all that plus some sandwiches and entry to the raffle. The experience of those nights surrounded by slash curtains and charring Regal Kingsize, I now realise, formed how I make work today. The panto gave me my devotion to theatre and opera as a truly communal experience. It should always be generous and warm, open hearted, both funny and moving, both deep and playful: you should always give the audience a great night out.
Then I discovered youth theatre and went to a fantastic arts college outside of my town, ran away to London and then went to Cambridge University where I saw my first opera. It was Ariadne auf Naxos starring the one and only Jessye Norman and I was an immediate convert. But it took me another 15 years to actually get to work in opera.
I directed plays when I graduated but couldn’t get a foot in the door with a single opera company. I suspect that a 22 year old mod with a broad Welsh accent was probably not the typical demographic of your average opera intern. But I suspect that the reason lies more within the systemic issues rife in the industry that favour young people from privileged backgrounds. Even very recently I was told by a staff director that they had worked for years for no pay to get into opera staff directing. This is the dangerous precedent that separates those who can from those who are the most talented. In any case, without 5 years of unpaid assisting work under my belt (I couldn’t afford to work for free), I had no chance of getting into opera.
Then Oliver Mears came to see a show of mine at the Globe and he asked me to make a Cosi Fan Tutte for the company he then ran, Northern Ireland Opera. The minute we started rehearsal it was like I’d finally come home. I’ve been very lucky to have had the most fun every moment I’ve directed opera. I love the singers, I love being completely immersed in music all day. I love collaborating with the conductor. I just feel like I’ve arrived where I need to be.
The paranoia of this moment is that having worked so hard to finally make opera that now it will all disappear. That’s probably not true, and of course I will get to make work in the future. But doubt is not entirely rational and it has a hunger that grows the more it gnaws away at you. I had a full, organised diary right up to 2023 and now big holes are appearing as work gets pushed back and even projects the furthest away in the distance are being rethought and reassigned. I long for some of that middle-class confidence to ride this out, but I come from a background hardwired to view work as unstable and wrought with the powerlessness of being a small thing within a big industry. All of my future employers are being really supportive and clear. But it still feels like whatever successes I have had are built on foundations as delicate as spun sugar.
Like so many people all I can do is wait and try to cling on to hope that the work that I have already invested so much of myself, my time and my thought into will get to actually see an audience. And know that live performance will always, always exist, whatever the industry of the day looks like.
In the meantime, I have been an active part of a number of freelance taskforces representing theatre and opera workers. Buildings were dominating the narrative of the recovery of theatre and opera and I realised that no one was standing up for the hundreds of thousands of people who are the driving forces in making the work happen. For this industry to survive we all need to act now to protect artists as well as infrastructure. The wig makers and carpenters, designers, vocal coaches, directors, singers, répétiteurs, dressers – all of them. I also set up a group for Welsh theatre makers as they were being ignored in the national conversation, and I have just started work on supporting directors who are in the early stages of their careers as we face a whole missing generation of brilliant artists.
This is a time of immense rupture. While I wish for none of the human tragedy, the death and the hell of what we’re going through, so much about the way we live in the future is up for grabs. And that’s so exciting. Brexit and this terrible pandemic could leave the industry risk adverse and fearful, but wouldn’t it be brilliant if instead we emerged into a braver and more equal future? Wouldn’t it be a triumph if the opera world re-thought the pathways into the industry to allow for more and better artists? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if opera houses worked out how to throw their doors open wider and embrace diversity a little harder? That’s what I’d love to see happen, so maybe we need to spend this strange between-time pushing for that.
Adele Thomas