Intimacy with a notorious villain is not always the route to professional fulfilment, but for Dominic Hill, life with Macbeth is paying dividends. Last autumn the director staged a powerful production of Shakespeare’s tragedy at Dundee Rep. This month, he is making his opera directing debut with Verdi’s Macbeth for a 19-date Scottish Opera tour. In November, he will turn his attentions to Ubu the King, a new version of Alfred Jarry ’s scatological satire by David Greig, the plot of which is based on the Scottish play.
“A detailed knowledge of the Shakespeare play is really useful,” says Hill, who is working on an opera for the first time. “Verdi’s version is really pared down, so knowing the play helps fill in the gaps, even if it’s just in your head. I can give the singers a working understanding of what’s happening in a scene in relation to the play.”
For this most thoughtful of directors, Macbeth is a chance to explore a story with endless potential. His production last year was intelligent and rich in detail, performed in modern dress, with war scenes echoing Iraq and Darfur. His leading couple were like a modern-day president and first lady. One critic called it “a cataclysmic portrait of what happens when political power decays into brutal self-interest”.
That kind of atmosphere carries over into his Scottish Opera production, which is in modern dress and tuned into the cataclysmic political movements of our own era. “I think I have unfinished business with that play, but probably every director does,” says Hill. “And I’m not sure that business has been finished by this production. There are things I have taken from last year’s production and used again because I think they worked well.”
Written in 1847, Macbeth is one of the most enduring works from the early part of the Italian composer’s career. With a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave (here sung in English), it was closely based on Shakespeare’s tragedy of the Scottish warrior whose loyalty to his king is overtaken by murderous ambition when a group of witches prophesy that he will rise to become king himself. Spurred on by his upwardly mobile wife, he becomes a killing machine, losing everything he holds dear, including his own wife, until his inevitable death.
In the process of translation and adaptation, Verdi’s opera took on qualities of its own. “Because it’s Verdi, it’s much more Catholic,” says Hill. “We’ve taken those ideas and pushed them a bit further. There’s quite a lot of religious imagery and this version has a more Christian feel to it.”
In his Dundee production, the ghost of the murdered Banquo was an invisible figment of Macbeth’s imagination, a comment on the hero’s troubled psychological state. Here in the Verdi, where the ghost suggests the possibility of the afterlife and of returning from the dead, Hill is playing such scenes to maximum operatic effect. Richard Wiegold as the risen Banquo will be in full, horrific view.
“There are operatic moments that are worth going for,” says Hill, although he points out that because this is a small-scale staging — playing in village halls from Banchory to Ballachulish — it is less extravagant than Verdi’s original conception. There are, for example, only three witches — as in the play — and not the large female chorus that the composer specified. Rather than a compromise, he believes this is a benefit.
“There’s a huge advantage of doing it on this scale,” says Hill, who joined Dundee Rep as artistic director in 2003 and has gone on to stage a number of acclaimed productions from the classical and modern ends of the canon.
“The decision to do it modern-dress came about because this is a tour to some extraordinary venues, some large, some minute, and it felt necessary to produce a show that could work on an intimate level. It needed to be naturalistic and domestic because of the reduced cast, so it then made sense to keep it contemporary as well.”
This version, which features the baritone Douglas Bowen and soprano Helena Leonard in the central roles, is less abstract than the last. Hill and his designer, Tom Piper, were influenced by a book of photographs of the Balkan war, a setting that allowed for Verdi’s combination of civil war, Christian imagery and a touch of the supernatural. “In eastern Europe, the countries had a big sense of tradition and religion, but were also trying to be modern,” says Hill. “That was what we were aiming for.”
Hill is following a route familiar to many directors who have been asked to bring theatre experience to the world of opera. The most prominent recent example is Anthony Neilson, the Scottish playwright and director, who was drafted in to stage Scottish Opera’s The Death of Klinghoffer, the controversial opera about Palestinian terrorists by John Adams, at the Edinburgh International Festival last month.
For opera lovers, the trend raises the possibility of more theatrically dynamic presentations — a case in point being Neilson’s decision to stage Klinghoffer’s kidnap among the audience. For directors used to the creative freedoms of theatre, however, it means a degree of readjustment to the particular demands of an existing musical score.
“One of the nicest discoveries is that you direct it just like you direct a play,” says Hill. “Verdi was a clever man and there are lots of times when he has taken the rhythm from the play. He has a great sense of drama, so, for example, the dagger scene in the play has that fantastic beginning where it’s panicky and they’re jumping on top of each other — and the opera does that too. Because he has such a good sense of drama, you can work with the rhythms and the pace he gives you.”
Much as Hill has enjoyed the experience and would like to do more, he is not about to desert the theatre. In response to the argument that opera is implicitly the best art form because it brings together all the others, he quotes the director Peter Brook. “You could say exactly the same about soup and it doesn’t make it the highest form of cuisine,” he laughs. “Opera can be fantastic, but I suppose I’m a word person.”
Next on Hill’s agenda is Ubu the King, a play that scandalised Paris for its vulgar schoolboy humour in 1896 and has remained controversial ever since. It takes elements of Macbeth and Richard III to tell a wayward story of the megalomaniac Ubu and his wife as they overthrow the king in order to become self-aggrandising despots.
Hill’s production, starring Communicado’s Gerry Mulgrew, is part of the Young Genius season being programmed by London’s Young Vic and Barbican theatres. “It’s a fantastic translation by David Greig, anarchic and messy, yet incredibly precise,” says Hill. “Often when you read Ubu in translation it exists in a strange, abstract no-man’s land, but what I like about this translation is that it’s very grounded in reality, even though it is still mad and allows for adventure.”
Macbeth, Thurso High school, September 6 and on tour until October 22; Ubu the King, Dundee Rep, November 1626
