Running a little faster. Robin Norton-Hale

We spoke to the artistic director of OperaUpClose, Robin Norton-Hale, about perceptions, barriers and the differences between directing theatre and directing opera (hot tip: none). Read on!

Who are you?

I’m Robin. I’m a director of opera and theatre, in that order. I tend to do a little bit more opera than theatre, partly because I think that the theatre world is a bit snobbish about opera, which is the opposite way around from what people tend to think. That’s another story…!

I’m also a writer and a mother of two small children. 

How did you get here? Why do you do what you do? And why in that order?

I studied English at University. I love words – my first love in the world of arts was books, novels, fiction. At school I also enjoyed performing, and music has always been a big part of my life – I played saxophone, violin and piano (not to a high standard), and my dad loves music and has really eclectic taste, and he took me to see things at English National Opera from when I was pretty small.

We’d sit high up in the gallery and he’d explain what was happening. I think I saw Peter Grimes when I was about 9, which I realise now is quite unusual! When I started at university I knew I didn’t want to be a performer but I was very interested in performing arts, storytelling and words and the way they all interact.

I thought (in my eighteen year old confident way), when I go to university, I’ll do some directing. When I got there (in my unconfident eighteen year old way), all the people that were involved in drama seemed to know each other. My friends weren’t in that world, so I didn’t do it.

In London after university, I just started going to the theatre obsessively - two or three times a week, all of the great under 26 schemes, five pound tickets - and I thought, “Oh no. I missed directing as a student so I’ll never direct anything now.” 

Obviously, at the age of twenty-two, you think ships have sailed. And I didn’t know anyone who worked in theatre. I had this English degree, I really wanted to write, but you couldn’t just...write. I didn’t feel I could, anyway. I did a journalism qualification, then got a job as press and marketing officer at English Touring Opera. It was combining my love of theatre and opera, and some writing, and I found it really interesting.

I found the marketing side much more interesting than the press. I never knew how to talk to the opera critics – it felt like we wanted them to write nice things about the work so much, the relationship was very one-sided. Marketing is telling existing and future audiences about the work and connecting with people, and if you get it right they’re just as excited as you are - I found that really interesting.

James Conway (Artistic Director of ETO), very kindly let me be his assistant director on a show that was part of a summer festival. I loved it and knew that this was what I needed to do. So that’s how I ended up directing, although it took a good few more years of using all my annual leave to direct shows, and various training courses, and assisting and shadowing before I felt I could begin to describe myself as a director. 

The way I introduced myself is wrong. I’m a stage director. I don’t think theatre and opera directing are different skills. I think you need to be aware of a few different things when working with opera singers - about what they need from you as a director or from the staging, so that they can produce that amazing sound. The training that opera singers and actors get is quite different, however the skills of the director are very similar. It annoys me that they are seen as such different mediums. 

I think there’s an idea in the theatre world that opera singers can’t act and connected to that, that opera directors can’t direct to the same level as theatre directors. People can be totally immersed in theatre, professionally, and really know their craft and industry and then say to me that they’ve never been to an opera, which I think is so bizarre. Some of the most inventive, theatrical stagings are in opera productions.

And. obviously, many singers really can act. The opera world sometimes feeds this idea that opera is lagging behind by inviting film and theatre directors to direct a huge opera – “Come and save us, you must show us how to do this…”

What is your role in getting rid of this ‘myth’?

Accidentally, I ended up being Artistic Director of a company (OperaUpClose). 

I was a freelance director, directing theatre in fringe pub theatres and staff directing/directing on touring mid-scale shows. I was introduced to Adam Spreadbury-Maher, who’d set up this thirty-five seat theatre above a really rough pub, The Cock Tavern Theatre, in Kilburn. We got talking about opera and he said that he really wanted to put an opera on there and he wanted it to be La Bohème. We agreed it would definitely be in English and he invited me to direct it. I offered to write a new translation.

This meeting happened in October of 2009. He said it should be on at Christmas time and I thought he meant the next year. He didn’t. It was that Christmas. I was tipex-ing out the Italian words and writing mine in in biro at the kitchen table every night after rehearsals, then running off photocopies each morning. The poor singers only had Act 1 and part of Act 2 when we started rehearsals. 

So, we put on this sort of DIY-show and partly because the press knew me from my role as press officer at ETO and partly, maybe, because there was something exciting about the idea of doing La Bohème with people who actually were students and in this grimy environment, we ended up with five or six national critics coming to the opening night.

And every night, the audience really loved it. I remember being surprised at the impact it had – I felt at home with fringe theatre, and opera, so putting them together seemed kind of obvious to me (and of course we weren’t the first to do opera in a pub theatre) but people were genuinely thrilled by it.

After La Bohème transferred to Soho Theatre, it was eligible for the Olivier Awards and it won, which was obviously amazing but also too early. It was our first show, we were still working out exactly what we wanted the company to be and what its ethos was. All of that got worked out with a lot more attention on us than would have been ideal. But, I’m not complaining, obviously. 

At first, OperaUpClose wasn’t even a registered company. We thought we were doing La Bohème for a four week run in a thirty-five seat theatre. I was just directing it, I had no official role in OperaUpClose – OperaUpClose was just a name. The name came about because we needed to say ‘someone presents La Bohème’ and OperaUpClose was a very good description of what the experience was going to be. Then it kind of snowballed. 

Of course, I wouldn’t suggest starting a company with someone you don’t know, on their credit card, but we hadn’t intended to start a company, just to put on one – hopefully good - show.  We had to build the company, after the fact.

I only became Associate Director after directing OUC’s first two shows and I had to really fight for my artistic input to be recognised in that way. By that point, OUC was already quite successful. I had to fight for that and then again later, to become joint Artistic Director.

I considered walking away a number of times, because there were some challenging personalities and we’d set up no parameters for running a company together. On the other hand, I knew we were incredibly lucky that La Bohème was so successful, and so we had an opportunity to really do something significant with this company.

I think an arts company probably always slightly defines itself and its mission as it goes along, but that was more true of OperaUpClose than most. 

How important is it to break down this wall between opera and theatre directing?

It probably seems like a pretty niche discussion to anyone outside the performing arts, but I do think within the industry it’s important to recognise it – that this is the way the opera world thinks about itself, or the theatre industry thinks about the opera industry. That idea that opera needs saving, or solving, is something we need to deal with, within the industry.

However, it’s a symptom of something much bigger, which is the image problem that opera still has. ‘Opera singers can’t act’ is a small part of that wider image problem. Mostly it is about image, but it also comes from a place of truth in some respects - from the idea that opera is grandiose, is not about people’s real lives, that the emotions are overblown, and that it’s incredibly expensive. All of that can be true – but opera can also be the most primal expression of our human experience. 

The opera industry’s perception of itself and the public, sometimes stereotyped, view of what opera is are two sides of the same coin. What we’ve been trying to do with OperaUpClose is, if you start off a metre away from the audience, there is no room for grandiose acting or semaphoring emotion or anything that is not incredibly truthful and detailed. And the singing has to be really good too, of course. There’s nowhere to hide.

OperaUpClose now performs in mid-scale venues, 400-800 seats normally, quite different from the 35-seat pub but still relatively up close compared to ‘normal’ opera, without an orchestral pit, which means you will always be closer. The band is on the stage. For me, the quality of the acting doesn’t change. You slightly turn up the volume, whether it’s the flicker of an eyelid or an eyebrow or a movement of the head or the whole body.

Unless all of that starts from truthfulness of emotion and understanding who the character is, what they want and being rooted inside the body, then what comes out physically is not going to be truthful. 

That is what is essential and central to what I do as a director and what we’re trying to do with OperaUpClose. We are breaking down this idea that opera is not about real people, real problems and real emotions.

All OperaUpClose shows are in English because I think any time you have a surtitle machine, it’s another barrier. The majority of people I encounter who haven’t been to an opera and are a little bit interested in doing so find language the biggest barrier to them accessing opera. The relief when they discover it can be in English is big, and it’s real.

There are certain groups within the industry and opera audiences who are vocal about only wanting to see opera in the original language and there’s still a lack of awareness of what a barrier that can be. It’s as if because ENO (and lots of other companies) have been doing opera in English for years, that’s enough, and it’s ok to have a slightly condescending conversation about how ‘it’s just better in the original though, isn’t it?’. Let the poor uninitiated people outside the opera club come in, if they like, but we’re not going to reach out our hands and welcome them.

Opera doesn’t need protecting. It’s a powerful art form – it can take change. For me, it’s just about telling the story as effectively and directly as possible and using whatever language achieves that. If that’s the original German /Italian, great but if it isn’t, change it. 

Early on at OperaUpClose, we knew translation didn’t describe what we do, so we use ‘English version’ for our librettos. When you translate an opera libretto, you already have to take quite a big step away from a literal translation because you have to make it fit the music.

You’re already making changes. It’s not like translating a novel. Once you start making those changes, I think, why not allow yourself to make the changes intentional, so that it’s more idiomatic, and truly fits the production? Work together with the director and translator to make something that doesn’t make people say, “What is this stuffy language?” You might get closer to the truth of what the librettist was saying in the first place. 

One thing I would say, which is an ethos for me, words and music are equal. For me, the best storytelling in opera is when those things are working together. All are equally important and have to be completely enmeshed. You have to try it and see what works, for singing, language and motivation. 

So although you can make sure your new English words fit the music and tell the story, you don’t know until you hear them sung what really works. They don’t exist separately from one another – and even though I sing the English words to myself when I’m writing, I still don’t know if they are right until I hear them really sung out by a proper singer.

What gives you the right to make those decisions?  Whose story is it?

Whose story is it? Every time we create a production, it’s a product of the time it’s created, and the people who created it. It’s the original composer and librettist’s story, and it’s also the story of the performers, director, conductor and everyone involved in the production, at that time. The same creative team working on the same opera ten years apart would make different shows. So, productions that we make coming out of the pandemic, will be informed by this moment.

And because productions will be - should be - at least partly the story of their creative team, it’s really important who makes up those creative teams. That’s something I’m increasingly aware of. I have this power, as an artistic director, to choose the creatives and artists that I work with. That changes the stories we tell. I am telling my story and that’s why all my librettos are feminist. I didn’t set out to write feminist librettos, they just are. 

Who am I to do it? Anyone who creates art is partly telling their story, and hopefully they’re trying to tell some other stories too. I try to highlight some of the stories that are less told.

Surprisingly, for people that see opera as more old-fashioned, because so many of the leads in opera are female, there is more scope for telling strong female stories than in lots of classic or canonical plays, where most of the leads are men. That’s exciting to me and one of the reasons I like working in opera. 

What did the pandemic do for you?

On a personal level, it gave me more time at home with my children and my husband, which was mostly great, not always! My kids are really little. Just before the pandemic, I was just coming back to work after a maternity leave with my second. I had just directed two shows - one for Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at the Globe and one for a drama school - in January and February 2020. I was in a world of, “You take him at 9am and I’ll get him after nursery, then you do dinner and I’ll…” Bleh. A lot of emotional energy just into scheduling, and resulting in the classic not feeling as though I was as present as I wanted to be at work or for my family.

What the pandemic has done for me and I think lots of other people is a realisation we don’t have to do things exactly as we always have, to one timetable, without question.

I’m hoping we can keep some of the new ways of doing things because we’ve learned we can work more efficiently and happily, in a much more flexible way. That’s big. I realise it’s a privilege to even be talking about flexible hours, and in many jobs it’s not an option. But I also think theatre has historically been particularly inflexible, and unsupportive to anyone with caring responsibilities, when we should be leading the way with this stuff.

And I’ve done a lot more running. It’s been amazing to run through the seasons on Hackney and Walthamstow marshes, near where I live. So what’s the pandemic done for me? I’ve got much faster! 

Artistically, it’s been kind of great to pause and reflect, though with huge sadness. I’m very aware that I’ve been very lucky. Although I do some freelance directing, I am on a salary with OperaUpClose, which meant that there were furlough options for me and the team. It also meant that I was in a position to create work that could be produced in the pandemic. I saw that as a responsibility, in a very small way, to try and create some paid work for artists.

We’ve produced a series of online Coffee Break Concerts. We did eight last year and two this year. We also did an online show for seven to ten year olds, called Sammy and the Beanstalk. It was a modern Christmas fairytale, informed by emotions brought up by the pandemic but not literally about the pandemic. 

I was interested in not saying, “here’s what we would have done on stage and here’s a film of that” and everybody being a bit sad that it’s not live. Rather, what can we do that makes a virtue of the fact that we’re all stuck at home?

For example, Sammy and the Beanstalk used a set where the walls actually moved and were drawn and had some animation. And for the Coffee Break concerts, these poor performers, performing at home, having to learn to use their cameras and lights! Rather than pretending, we made it a virtue and had them singing into laptops and so on, and I think they worked better as a result. 

It has allowed me to do a mashup of the art forms. These so-called concerts have got Shakespeare, some new performance poetry, some opera. That’s really hard to do on stage because of this pigeonholing that we do with art forms. And when you’re touring there are maybe eight operas that theatres are interested in booking, in terms of title recognition.

So the pandemic has enabled us to choose new poets and pieces and present new things. I wonder if we can take some of the online work to demonstrate to programmers that maybe we can be a bit more daring about mixing art forms, when we go live again. 

As we come out of lockdown, can you take some of these things forward with you?

For sure. During this year, obviously Black Lives Matter was around before but gained huge momentum and more recently, the death of Sarah Everard focused attention on violence against women.

There has been a lot of righteous anger, and the fact that the world has slightly been on hold has I hope given us an opportunity to look at what has been wrong and to focus on what could be better, when the world starts again. 

Of course, the world hasn’t totally been on hold and I recognise it’s easier to talk about these things and what is wrong than it is to genuinely rebuild better. I do feel that the kind of breadth of anger and emotion, first about the killing of George Floyd and then the report that came out recently here that concluded, ‘oh, there’s no racism….’  is a real opportunity for genuine change. It’s also difficult to know how much I’m existing in a bubble on social media. It’s always that way isn’t it?

I feel that things are being put in place that mean that we can come back saying, ‘you know, we were only doing lip service to things before, we need to do better.’  I feel that. I feel that myself and about Opera Up Close.

We weren't doing badly, compared to the world, but not doing badly isn’t good enough. That’s through everything - what work are we programming, who are we working with, how do we set up rehearsal rooms to be supportive, not just for carers like I was talking about before, but to be much more inclusive.

A few performers for the Coffee Break Concerts were performers with disabilities. We’ve hardly worked with disabled performers in our live shows. Doing the online work has shown us there’s no excuse to not take that to the next level – no excuse but also a huge benefit to us, because the work is so much richer when you work with a wider range of people in every sense. It’s easy to say, but this year has shown me how true it is. 

For me, I’m going to try to keep on running faster (literally, too - I’ve booked myself into three half marathons in a fit of over enthusiasm). Seriously, I want there to be actions, rather than just talk. I’m still working out what the best actions are.  

We are in the work we create. I think I’ll be a bit more intentional about that, about what stories I’m telling and what stories I’m trying to tell. As a white woman, I feel that I have the right to tell white women’s stories. Does that mean then, that I don’t programme stories about black women? No, obviously not, but it will mean working with a director who has more right to tell that story. I think sometimes, we can tie ourselves in knots about having the right to tell a story and then end up not telling it at all. 

Who are you?

I’m a theatre maker and a storyteller and I’m really excited about what we can do next. I mean, with Opera Up Close, the arts world...the world. I know there’s been a huge amount of pain and loss in the last year but I feel it’s a real moment of possibility.