Read on for fascinating insights into Riders To The Sea, OperaUpClose’s ground-breaking new production coming to the Northcott in February.
About Riders to the Sea
John Synge’s original play, Riders to the Sea, which Vaughan Williams set directly to music, represents a rural Irish community through the key themes of paganism, tradition vs. modernity, and fatalism. Synge first visited the Aran Islands in 1897 with his friend and poet W B Yeats, returning every summer until 1903. Riders to the Sea was originally inspired by a story told to Synge during his time there, of a man from Inishmaan whose body had washed up hundreds of miles away on the shore of County Donegal. Synge continued listening to and collecting local stories, recording them in his book before selecting the most poignant to feature in scenes of his play. He wanted to create a dynamic that felt culturally authentic and utterly significant to the emotional truth felt between the characters and audience.
About the Prologue: The Last Bit of the Moon
This new choral work has been created as a musical response and prologue to Vaughan William’s Riders to the Sea. Developed through a series of workshops led by composer and vocal leader Michael Betteridge (pictured) and Southampton-based writer development agency ArtfulScribe, this is a piece about community, caring, and a contemporary reflection on what we mean by family and home in today’s society.
You can enjoy a sneak peek of The Last Bit of the Moon by listening to the audio clip below.
Listen now
Q&A With Director Flora McIntosh
Flora is a highly experienced and respected performer, facilitator and producer with a passion for reinvention and co-creation. Following a long association with OperaUpClose singing multiple roles to great critical acclaim, Flora became Artistic Director in 2022 and is thrilled to be leading the organisation through its next stage of evolution. Read on to discover her thoughts on Riders to the Sea.
Why Riders to the Sea?
When OperaUpClose moved to Southampton we were really keen to explore music and stories that reflected the environment and community we were now part of. Stories of and from the sea led me to Riders. What struck me immediately was how much more than the sum of its parts this piece is – ostensibly a very specific story of a small place, it actually holds huge universal themes of love, grief, and home that speak to the core of our humanity. So it is both small and intimate, and epic and mighty – perfect for OperaUpClose.
Riders to the Sea is just 40 minutes long in its original form; I saw this as a brilliant opportunity for reinventing and reframing a classic work through commissioning new writing that could illuminate, enhance, and expand the original material. And through this reinvention a totally different approach to the narrative has emerged – it’s been a true process of exploration and discovery, one which I’m excited to share.
Do you need to know much about the play or opera to enjoy the show?
I would say, hand on heart, you don’t need to know anything in advance. Just like you don’t need to know anything about a film you might choose to watch, or a book you might choose to read. Sung in English and with captions throughout, there are multiple layers of storytelling going on in this production using sound, video, words, and movement. I really hope everyone takes something different from it; there is no ‘right’ way.
The show mixes recordings and projections with live music and singing. As a director, how do you bring all these elements together?
The key is ensuring you have brilliant people facilitating their area of expertise. I’m lucky – this production is an embarrassment of talent! Bringing those people together in shared purpose and being clear that we are all telling the same story is what my job is really about. Each element weaves together and integrates to create a multi-media, multi-sensory theatrical world that serves the music and drama but never distracts.
This production has no pit, so the orchestra is on stage with actors. Why is presenting your shows in this way important to you?
So much storytelling in opera is told through sound. The instrumental players and the colours and textures they provide are key to the narrative and always so much more than an accompaniment to the singers. Performing at an intimate scale gives us an amazing opportunity to rethink the instruments as key characters in the piece. All the characters speak, just some speak through their instruments and some through their song. Taking this approach dismantles the barrier that a pit can sometimes create – the audience aren’t just receiving the story, they are in it. And our approach to reinvention, not reduction, means we are able to make really strong, contemporary artistic choices that take the classics into a new place for new audiences.
What do you hope audiences will take from the show?
This is always such a difficult question – audiences always take something different than you imagine they might, and I embrace that. But I hope that some take away an experience that has changed their view of what opera can be and who it is for. And I hope they are given an opportunity to reflect on the great, agonising, and beautiful truth that grief is the price we pay for love, nothing is ever really lost, and there is always a path to the light.
Riders To The Sea is in Exeter for one night only, so book now for a unique experience of opera as you’ve never seen it before.
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