By Diane Parkes
For stage designer Charles Edwards, Giacomo Puccini is the greatest opera composer because his stories cut straight to the heart. Puccini’s understanding of people ensures his works, which include Tosca, La bohème and Madam Butterfly,are among the most popular and frequently staged operas worldwide.
And it is that relatability which Charles, together with director Sir David McVicar, has put at the centre of the latest touring Welsh National Opera double bill of Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi which comes to Mayflower Theatre on Wednesday 13 November.
“I think Puccini’s world depends on realism,” says Charles. “That is what gives Puccini’s tragedies their pathos and what gives the comedy, Gianni Schicchi, the humour.”
The two works, presented in a co-production with Scottish Opera, can be performed together as a triptych with Puccini’s Il tabarro, as pairs or individually. Each is different in tone and subject matter so David and Charles made the decision to also create totally separate and contrasting sets.
Suor Angelica tells the story of the nun Angelica who has been sent to a convent by her wealthy family for an undisclosed transgression. After a silence of seven years, Angelica’s aunt visits with devastating news.
Charles and David were keen to relate the story in an environment which would connect with modern British audiences.
“With Suor Angelica, we did quite a lot of research into the Magdalene laundries and convents that Irish and Scottish young mothers were sometimes condemned to,” Charles explains. “We felt that made a connection which culturally resonates a lot for us in this country.
“I felt the colour world for that needed to have a sense of institutionalism, a sort of sterility rather than cleanliness, and frankly boredom. In Suor Angelica, Puccini is trying to portray an environment which is so stultifyingly inactive, dull and dreary that the light catching the water in a fountain is the most interesting thing that happens to those poor women in there.
“I don’t get the sense that these women are there entirely voluntarily. Puccini had a relative in a convent and I think he felt she had been imprisoned there, and these women are the same, either through the Catholic faith or because the women had fallen in some way, falling pregnant out of wedlock for example.”
Gianni Schicchi is a very different story. Puccini’s only comedy, it features the family of the rich Buoso Donati who are waiting for their relative to die so they can inherit his lands and money. On discovering he has left everything to a monastery, they hatch a plot with Gianni Schicchi to alter Donati’s will – but little do they realise Gianni has schemes of his own.
“Gianni Schicchi is the funniest opera ever written by anybody and that has its own challenges,” says Charles. “I’ve done it three times and it has never failed to make me crack up. It’s Joe Orton meets the greatest stage composer of the early 20th century Puccini.
“It is so brilliantly constructed that it carries you with it. So as a designer you don’t fuss with it but you have to give it focus and precision. You also need to look at all of the characters and make them make sense and ensure the links between them make sense.”
The comedy comes from those characters, their reactions and their relationships to each other.
“You talk about a family at a deathbed waiting for someone to die – it’s not essentially a funny location,” says Charles. “So the fact that Puccini manages, from the get-go in the piece, to make a comedy shows his brilliance.
“David and I sat talking about this piece for a long time and he’s a great actor and would play out the roles of all of these characters, these horrific family members, based I think on people he had met!
“Our production is technically set in Glasgow and David felt that the way of getting the audience to understand was for people to recognise Auntie Mabel or Auntie Gladys or Uncle Donald in that bunch of people on stage.”
Again Charles went for a specific palette for the design which is set in the 1970s.
“The colour scheme for Schicchi was quite simply nicotine,” he says. “You know those old houses that you’ve been to, when you had relatives in the past who smoked and their walls are brown. So in some way the set is a physical representation of his lungs, it’s tarry.
“But also we don’t get to know much about Buoso Donati and we wanted to just look at a little bit more of what he was interested in.”
The set is therefore packed full of references to Donati’s life including countless mementoes of holidays in Florence – a nod to Puccini’s original location of the opera in that Italian city.
“There is an enormous number of props because we wanted to create the sense that he is a hoarder. One of those people who simply can’t throw something away. He’s someone whose whole life is in that room.”
Charles also had to keep in mind the practicalities of taking two sets to different sized venues.
“Touring opera in this country is an expensive operation. If you are taking an orchestra, chorus and staff around the country then it’s the best example of levelling up that a company can do –and it’s going to cost money. It is complex and the practicalities of what the set does is very much part of that.”
Charles made his Royal Opera debut in 2003 and has gone on to design operas which have been staged in leading opera venues across Europe, USA, Canada and Australia. He has also directed a host of productions including Così fan tutte, Tristan and Isolde, Turandot and Les Contes d’Hoffmann.
He hopes audiences respond from the heart to Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi.
“I think the emotional journey it takes you on should be a bit cathartic. It should drag you through the emotions. You should be really touched and moved by Suor Angelica and then you’ll laugh at Gianni Schicchi.
“Puccini is probably the most popular opera composer of all and the reason why is that he can get into our bloodstreams, he can activate things in our own brains that are so immediate.
“And that is what all live theatre is about. It’s the communal sense, you are in a huge room with a lot of people sharing the experience. That’s what so exciting about all live performance and opera goes further than anything else.”
Tickets for WNO (Suor Angelica & Gianni Schicchi (13 November 2024, Rigoletto (14 and 16 November 2024), and Opera Favourites (15 November 2024) are on sale at mayflower.org.uk or 02380 711811.
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