So my name's Polly and I'm an opera director and this is the second time I've
worked at the Royal College. Working here has always been super fun
and really quite artistically liberating. It's lovely to now work with the Opera
School students on the Magic Flute, and what I'm loving is the double cast element
of the process because it allows me to work collaboratively with them, and also you notice
how much the students who are like, for example, sharing the role of Papageno, support each ot
her
through that process, and one person has an idea and the other one takes it and develops it
and it becomes a really fun collaboration So what we're trying to achieve with
this production of the Magic Flute is to really focus on Pamina's
journey through the story and to give the whole the whole piece
a kind of contemporary context. We use two different kind of
worlds to elaborate on that. We have a world of a school, where Sarastro
is a teacher and there are other priests who are teach
ers within the school, but most of the
protagonists of the piece are school children, so they're aged between like 14 and 16.
They're on the cusp of that point where you know you're no longer a child but you're not
yet an adult and you're discovering sex, desire, what friendship means when
you're in a school environment... Really all of that big mixture of emotions. We mostly look at the plot through Pamina's
perspective of what's going on in her school life. I'm placing the character
at ar
ound 15 or 16 in age. We use the Queen of the Night as a kind of,
like incantatory force who appears to Pamina and kind of tries to galvanise her
as she develops a will to power. My character in the Magic Flute
is Papagena and she is Papageno's lover that he's trying to find
throughout most of the opera. So in our telling of the story,
Papageno is the clown of the class and as is so often the case with
people who are clowns, that humor that he employs masks a great
deal of unhappiness and
loneliness. He hasn't quite made that empathetic leap
between people being nice to you because you're nice to them and because of that I
think he's really quite immature for his age. My character is Prince Tamino.
He is going on a quest to save the princess, but we're really looking at whether she also saves me.
My favourite part are the two big quintets that we sing with the Ladies and Papageno
because it's so exciting to do that kind of ensemble music making on stage.
Quite a rare opportun
ity to do that. Within this production, Monostatos is one
of the dominating students in the school. He's a bit of a ring leader and gets involved
within a love triangle with Tamino and Pamina. If I was to sum up this opera in three phrases
I would say it has incredibly beautiful music, a plot which is wild and wacky, and for us
the challenge, which we're really relishing and the students are embracing, is finding a way
to bring the story into a contemporary narrative. I think in our product
ion, because we are representing people younger, there is a
sense of trying to do that being faithful to our own memories of what it was like to
be that age without playing a caricature. I think that the piece is super relevant
to a contemporary audience because you see so many micro-aggressions in our production
between boys and girls, and then girls resisting and fighting back and actually the whole issue
of how teenagers learn to behave around each other and codes of masculinity which ar
e learnt
from the boy's elders, then play out in the development of the behavior between the girls and
boys in the school and hugely relevant to today. you
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