I love the feeling, occurring literally as I took the photograph below, and figuratively in Phillip Cushman’s metaphor, of watching over the director’s shoulder in a rehearsal room. I try to read both the emergent piece, and her intuitive process, as she questions, prompts, nudges and so pulls a story from the freeform improvisation. I watch three singers and an actor begin to piece together our miniature version of an operatic masterpiece: Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd. A reimagining of the claustrophobic psychodrama, told and retold as poem, novella, opera, film, begins to find its shape—to become, again, a story.

Rehearsals for Billy Budd Reimagined, with (left to right) Sam Booth, Rob Gildon, Andew Tipple and Joel Williams, directed by Sarah Dowling. — Rehearsals for *Billy Budd Reimagined*, with (left to right) Sam Booth, Rob Gildon, Andew Tipple and Joel Williams, directed by Sarah Dowling.

This was the sixth of such titles I produced, a series called ROH Reimagined that I made for the Royal Opera House’s Learning and Participation Department, with the brilliantly generous director and choreographer Sarah Dowling. It was an unexpected turn of events in my musty excursions through all branches of narrative that I should become any sort of theatre-maker, but as a miniaturist I’ve now produced a series of pieces of which I’m proud and remain deeply fond. In each case we took an iconic opera or ballet: we’ve tackled La bohème, The Magic Flute, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Swan Lake, La traviata and now Billy Budd and I’ve provided a few snapshots below. In each case, the vast cast of the main stage were absent; neither voluminous chorus or corps at our disposal, each piece had a cast of up to 4 singers, dancers and actors. And rather than an orchestra of over a hundred, we had an ensemble of between 3 - 5 orchestral players interpreting intricate scores skilfully condensed by composer and conductor Patrick Bailey. Each of these ‘reimagined’ titles shared a democratising proposition: opera and ballet are such rarified forms of storytelling as to become impenetrable; freighted as they are with social baggage, laden with suspicion and fear for the uninitiated. Get over those hurdles—as well as the significant financial barrier—and even then, the value that remains can feel like eating your cultural greens: edifying, but not necessarily enjoyable. So with our Reimagined series, we wondered, could we create portable, pop-up versions that retained a live and acoustic aesthetic, a playfulness and strangeness - which could be performed within 30 minutes and would be stumbled upon by unsuspecting audiences in city centres, abandoned shops, community festivals, and other non-traditional venues and yet viscerally intrigue, unsettle and inspire? And what does this process suggest about the nature of a story and storytelling?

It’s a process with a pleasing—to me, at least—absurdity at its heart. Opera and ballet, particularly the former, by any definition, are epic forms, drawing on myth and legend, ventriloquising revolutionaries and calibrated to conjure the consumption of the gods by fire and the remaking of the earth. Richard Wagner’s famous description of opera as the ‘gesamtkunstwerk’—the total artwork—in which all art forms are fused, captures this epic intensity of purpose:

The three chief artistic faculties of the entire man have once, and of their own spontaneous impulse, evolved to a trinitarian utterance of human Art; and this was in the primal, earliest manifested art-work, the Lyric, and its later, more conscious, loftiest completion, the Drama. The arts of Dance, of Tone, and Poetry: thus call themselves the three primeval sisters whom we see at once entwine their measures wherever the conditions necessary for artistic manifestment have arisen. By their nature they are inseparable without disbanding the stately minuet of Art; for in this dance, which is the very cadence of Art itself; they are so wondrous closely interlaced with one another, of fairest love and inclination, so mutually bound up in each other's life, of body and of spirit: that each of the three partners, unlinked from the united chain and bereft thus of her own life and motion, can only carry on an artificially inbreathed and borrowed life;—not giving forth her sacred ordinances, as in their trinity, but now receiving despotic rules for mechanical movement.
- Richard Wagner, The Artwork of the Future, 1850

Like atomic fusion, this improbable artistic hubris is capable of generating both colossal, humbling power and sprawling infertile wastelands; it’s not immune from the latter, even when it has the massed forces of global artistic superpowers behind it. Of all the artworks I’ve encountered, the most transcendently rich and most bloatedly preposterous, have all been opera productions. But on our tiny scale, with a handful of brilliant and carefully costumed artists, a small ensemble of skilled instrumentalists, no set to speak of, and props mostly inexpertly made by me or gleaned from the reaches of the internet on a small budget, what was left, even of this way of telling stories?

Answering requires an admission: love opera deeply though I do, I don’t think it’s effective as a storytelling form. Story in the sense of beginning, middle and end (I defy you to identify those in the rambling delights of The Magic Flute), of verisimilitude (a more powerful inhabiting of Boheme’s Rodolfo on record than Luciano Pavarotti is hard to find, but watching him ‘park and bark’ his way through the arias on youtube is as likely to raise a snigger as a swoon), or narrative complexity (boy meets girl, society and illness torture girl, girl dies accurately covers much of the core 19th century repertoire). But it’s also not the point. In the words of Danish opera director, Kasper Holten:

When I meet people who say they don’t like opera, it turns out nine out of 10 haven’t ever actually seen one. "Isn’t opera where they sing 'I love you, I love you, I love you' or 'I am dying, I am dying, I die now' – and it takes them 10 minutes to do so?" I get asked. To express something about love or death in 10 minutes is fast! These are emotions we struggle with our whole lives.

So this is the equation to which we were working in our modest series, to take people to the ‘big emotional peaks and abysses’ with this rapidity, to test this proposition perhaps even more extremely: 10 minutes to die is economic after three hours of emotional work-out at Covent Garden, how about after three minutes, interrupting a trip to Tesco, in Stoke-on-Trent city centre?

Billy Budd will always be close to my heart. It’s an opera by Benjamin Britten, with a libretto by E.M. Forster after an unfinished novella by Herman Melville, and was first performed at Covent Garden in 1951. In 1995, aged 11, I saw the final dress rehearsal of Francesca Zambello’s then new production on the same stage and was as disturbed, provoked, amazed and bewildered as I’ve ever been by an artwork — and a lifelong love affair with the form began. Reassessing it in trying to condense it into 30 minutes, its lack of story was striking: how had this almost plotless piece felt so gripping, so shattering aesthetically, and subversive both sexually, and spiritually? I was unsettled—without the words to describe why—watching what was simultaneously a homoerotic and Christlike Billy whirling in the vortex of a sound-world that I didn’t recognise as melody. And yet, I found myself hungry to occupy this strange land longer. I had carried into that theatre the storied defaults of my childhood: Roman Catholicism, proto-heterosexuality, and—strange child as I was—certainty that romantic violin concertos were the height of musical achievement. In short I arrived a good, if eccentric, middle-class subject, and emerged as an alien thing with none of those identities quite in place. I was now a modernist opera lover.

As described in Holten’s emotional economy of the 10-minute love or death aria, Billy Budd is a series of intense, interior set-pieces describing the magnetic and charismatic innocence of the titular not-quite-holy, not-quite-fool; the unbidden envy of Master-At-Arms, John Claggart consumed with the same death-driven love that animates Tristan and Isolde, but turned inwards, unacknowledgeable, and raging; and the tormented duty of the ‘serious man’ of Captain Vere, condemned by his own fidelity to his post and so to destroy truth and beauty by his tightly wound story of honour. (We will return to Vere as ‘serious man’ in Episode 5 of our podcast).

Billy Budd, then, emerged in that rehearsal room as perhaps the easiest and most satisfying of these titles to condense because of the particular moment in the evolution of the form that Britten’s opera represents. Budd is not a well-made Victorian play in which—so very perplexingly—everyone sings, like traviata or bohème. It comes from a time, I came to think, when opera loosed itself from storytelling and embraced story in the sense with which our project here is preoccupied. A generation before Shostakovich had paved the way, turning absurdist Gogol anti-narrative and castration-fantasy into the dazzlingly strange opera The Nose, in the intervening years, Janáček had transformed the total-artwork into alienated staged vignettes from a brutal Siberian prison—exhilarating and profound, but not meaningfully a story; Berg had embraced modernism in storytelling and music in all of its prismatic alienation. To my taste, it was in the artistic and social convulsions of the last century, that opera came into its own.

As I sat in the rehearsal room and puzzled, laughed, and experimented with the generous and talented team, this formulation of story counter storytelling emerged for me. This was opera unpicked from the compulsion to drive storied action and plot, allowed to become a place where all those forces Wagner marshalled and described, could unite to reflect back to ourselves our messy and irresolvable complexity. In a work like Billy Budd, somewhat bereft of plot, our contradictions, our incorrigible plurality, the notion that we are living, not in the single story of our perception, but in the multiple stories of our multiply social selves rises to the fore. Rather than as the ‘natural trinity’ that Wagner proposed, perhaps it’s the impossibility and alienation of the fusion of music and character and poetry and architecture and painting and dance and, and, and… that makes it so acute a form. In an opera like Britten’s we can, as per Holten’s claim, fall in love in a moment, or do the work of dying within the confines of an aria. Perhaps especially so, in a form that throws into the mix the antinomies of these noble lifetime-struggles—our self-hatreds, our revulsions, our thwarted and all-too-ordinary heroisms. In short, our fractured and fractious selves.

Reading Wagner from here, it’s not, then, the separation of ‘dance, tone, and poetry’ that renders art “bereft thus of her own life and motion”. Rather, storytelling is, in itself, a ‘bereaving’ of the complexity of life from the plot-points of a story. As we discuss in our first episode, stories operate by selection: it’s a necessarily artificial act to turn the chaos of reality into the structure of a story. That artifice gifts us every fiction ever made, as well as the meanings we ascribe, moment-to-moment and in recollection, to our fragile lives.

Opera is just another storytelling selection, but one which self-consciously marshals a huge range of artistic resources, and usually categorically separate disciplines, to the task of selection. It’s therefore ‘every-art’ in its limitations and ‘total-art’ in its formal propositions. So it’s not the unity of opera’s constituent forms but its contradictory impossibility, constantly risking absurdity, which preposterously and (almost!) impossibly, finds a way to go on. As an artistic aim, as an aim for a life, even in miniature, that is as total and as fragmented, as absurd and ambiguous—and therefore as human—as a work of art can be.