Deborah Warner, stage director: “Shakespeare is many years ahead of us” | Culture | EUROtoday

It is difficult to imagine that the English director Deborah Warner (Oxfordshire, 66 years previous), an authority on Shakespeare, had not confronted the textual content of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “The explanation is simple and has to do with my first experience as a spectator,” she says after a rehearsal on the Teatro Real. “When I was nine years old I saw Peter Brook’s historic production in Bristol and decided I wanted to dedicate myself to this.” He left that efficiency with the will to make theater and the understanding, shared by many administrators of his era, that there was little so as to add to the “dazzling Dream” brookiano.

Almost six a long time later, Warner has discovered within the operatic adaptation that Benjamin Britten composed for the 1960 Aldeburgh Festival a “perfect excuse” with which to settle his explicit pending rating. “There have been many weeks of intense rehearsals, with some doubts at the beginning, until discovering that the work is not black or white, but an infinite range of nuances,” he says concerning the new staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream which opens tomorrow on the Madrid Coliseum. “Now I think it may be Britten’s most accessible opera, but a month ago it wasn’t so clear to me,” he admits.

It was the composer himself, whose demise will mark half a century in December, who was answerable for writing the libretto in report time. Over the course of some weeks, and with the assistance of his accomplice, the tenor Peter Pears, he lowered the unique textual content virtually by half. “They cut a lot and reorganized the complex labyrinth of the plot, but without altering the essence of this sensational comedy,” says Warner. “In fact, in the entire opera we only find one line that does not come from the pen of Shakespeare, whose writing, by the way, is loaded with music, that of the demanding iambic verse.”

After his time on the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and the Royal Shakespeare Company, Warner received over audiences along with his imaginative revisions of the classics. His Richard II with Fiona Shaw within the function of the king, his Medea in a psychological key or his radical studying of The faculty of gossip They bear the mark of a mode that doesn’t hesitate to take dangers. “There are directors who come to the theater with a life jacket on, but I prefer to jump into the water without knowing if I will make it or not,” he boasts. “I like to explore as I go with the actors and, if a good idea appears, I follow it even if it betrays the concept I brought from home.”

The opera tells how, throughout an evening of spells and misunderstandings, 4 lovers discover their emotions disrupted by the magic of fairies till, at daybreak, order is restored and every part returns to regular. “In Britten’s libretto the action does not start in the real world of the court of Athens, but goes directly to the universe of fantasy, an exclusive territory of childhood, with its mixture of charm and anarchy,” explains Warner. “And, since the forest in which the characters move is governed by ambiguity and artifice, it made no sense to recreate that landscape as a set.”

The energy of the phrase

Instead, we discover an set up product of fragments of nature. “My approach refers, in a certain way, to Elizabethan theater,” continues the British stage director. “In that tradition, the forest was above all the stage itself, that empty space that Brook spoke of.” And he adds: “In Shakespeare’s England it was enough to Wooden O [como se conocía al teatro circular del Globe] and the power of the word to contain all possibilities: with very few elements the public could travel to the fields of France, to the wasteland of king lear or to the remote island of The storm”.

During the manufacturing, which might be on show till March 22, Warner resorts to a number of “doublings” that multiply the presence of some characters. “The elf Puck, for example, appears divided between an aerial acrobat and an actor who recites the text,” he confirms. Something related occurs with youngsters: whereas some extras transfer across the stage, the white voices of the ORCAM sing from the pit. “I know this may be controversial, but at that age it is not easy to sing, run and jump at the same time,” he justifies his resolution. “This way they can deploy all that energy without losing vocal quality.”

Maestro Ivor Bolton will direct absolutely the premiere of this co-production with the Royal Ballet and Opera of London and the Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. “You don’t need to be an expert to perceive in the score the brilliance with which Britten distinguishes and makes the four worlds of the work collide.” Crystalline Ringers within the Fairy Kingdom; better lyricism within the Lovers passages; brass and bassoons for the Artisans and solemn chords on the Court. “And above all there is the world of sleeping, which is one of the composer’s great territories,” he says. “No one has written dream music like him.”

Countertenor Iestyn Davies, soprano Liv Redpath and bass Clive Bayley lead the virtually fully British forged of this DreamBritten’s third opera that Joan Matabosch, inventive director of the Teatro Real, entrusts to Deborah Warner. “I couldn’t refuse, because the working conditions of Billy Budd [que se estrenó en Madrid en 2017] y Peter Grimes [en 2021] They were truly exceptional,” he celebrates. “When you have a team like that you can take risks, try, make mistakes and start again. “El Real is one of the few theaters in the world where it is still possible to create a real production.”

The sense of latent hazard that characterizes lots of Warner’s productions finds on this love of a summer time evening a dramaturgical vein that flees from morality. “Shakespeare never tells you what to think,” he warns. “Describe all possible forms of human behavior and let them speak for themselves.” More than 4 a long time have handed since his first function as The stormon the head of his firm Kick Theatre, and assures that he nonetheless has many miles to sail: “More than four centuries later, Shakespeare is still many years ahead of us.”