Not just the look, how the sets work is part of the narrative - my encounter with designer Leslie Travers
Verdi's grand opera Don Carlo opens at Grange Park Opera tonight (18 June 2016), a striking choice for such a compact opera house and the designer responsible for the challenge is Leslie Travers whose work has included the Aldeburgh Festival's production of Peter Grimes on the beach for the 2013 Aldeburgh Festival, the recent premiere of Rolf Wallin's Elysium at Den Norske Opera in Oslo, Richard Strauss's Salome in Santa Fe, and Bellini's I Puritani at Welsh National Opera. Travers also designed Opera Holland Park's out-door promenade production of Will Todd's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which transferred so triumphantly to Covent Garden's Linbury Studio last year.
I met up with Leslie to talk about his designs, and how he translates sound into visuals. We chat at his studio, a lively place with a number of Leslie's models visible at the rear. (Read the full interview on PlanetHugill.com)
Incredibly ambitious
We started by talking about the Grange Park Opera production of Verdi's Don Carlo, which is being directed by Jo Davies. This will be the first time Leslie has designed this huge piece, and it is incredibly ambitious to fit Verdi's demands into the Grange Park theatre especially as the opera requires such a sense of scale in the designs, and Leslie finds that Verdi demands that with each scene change you jump directly into the next scene. He and director, Jo Davies, have decided to deliver all the different spaces Verdi expects, rather than using a single set.
Here Leslie brings up something which he comes back to a number of times in our discussions, the sense of scenic development in the piece and the way there is a sense of movement between scenes. I get the impression that Leslie is as interested in what happens between scenes as in the scenes themselves. It is clear that some thought has gone into it. The great Auto-da-fe scene happens just before the interval, so the rest of the design needs to work forwards and backwards from there. Leslie's designs use clever elements which are adaptable, and some of the scene changes are choreographed so they become part of the theatrical experience, which also removes the need for endless pauses. When we talked, they had just done the piano dress rehearsal and Leslie was happy that they had showed that all the changes could be achieve in time.
The design side of an opera is something of a mystery to most people
Leslie admits that the design side of an opera is something of a mystery to most people, but there is much more to it than simply giving the performers something to stand on, or stand against. For Leslie it is very much tied up to the dramaturgy of the piece, and the designs need to reflect the performance on stage. And everything that the audience sees on stage has to have a reason to be there, and must be part of the narrative. For Leslie design is as much about what you do not choose to put on stage, and he feels that the audience is involved in these choices.
For Don Carlo (which is being performed in the four-act version), the work opens with a funeral and Leslie feels that everything comes out of that architecture. He has brought a sense of scale and mass to the designs, using an abstracted essence of the architectural elements like the cathedral, rather than literal realism.
He immediately knew that he wanted to do something in the theatre
Read the full interview on PlanetHugill.com