4 – 5 July Read our review 5 July
Bringing the maritime opera to audiences in unconventional performance venues at waterside locations, award-winning OperaUpClose in partnership with recent RPS Award winning Manchester Camerata reinvigorate Wagner’s classic with an English libretto by poet and novelist Glyn Maxwell and an 8-piece chamber orchestration by Laura Bowler.
The Flying Dutchman is a haunting political tale exploring the displacement of people and the psychology and realities of living on an island with hardening borders,bringing an urgent and contemporary relevance to the fable of the ships captain cursed to roam the sea forever.Opening at Turner Sims in Southampton, The Flying Dutchman will then tour across the UK to extraordinary performance spaces in waterside locations finishing at live music venue Invisible Wind Factory, Liverpool.
The production steers from traditional ‘end-on’ performance, breaking the fourth wall and immersing the audience directly in the world of the story.It dismantles the traditional barriers between pit, stage and orchestra with all performers, instrumentalists and singers, having equal agency as storytellers. It includes pre-recorded voices from a national network of community choirs, a virtuosic chamber orchestra and a principal cast of internationally-renowned opera singers.
Artistic Director Flora McIntosh said, “This Dutchman is a meeting of classic material with strong, contemporary voices creating a powerful dialogue between the old and the new. Reconceived as a tale of paranoia, propaganda and people smuggling, performed in places and spaces that connect directly to the material, this production takes a highly theatrical and innovative approach to musical storytelling.”
Glyn Maxwell is a prolific and celebrated writer of poetry, plays, novels and libretti.He has won several awards for his poetry, including the Somerset Maugham Prize, the E. M. Forster Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. His work has been shortlisted for the Costa, Forward and T. S. Eliot Prizes. Many of his plays have been staged in the UK and USA, including The Lifeblood, which won British Theatre Guide’s Best Play Award at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2004, and Liberty, which premiered at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2008. Glyn’s critical guidebook On Poetry was described by Hugo Williams in The Spectator as “a modern classic”. In his “brilliantly unclassifiable” (The Guardian) sequel, Drinks With Dead Poets: The Autumn Term, several deceased poets appear as characters, their speech taken verbatim from their writings. The rights to his epic poem based on the Flying Dutchman legend, Time’s Fool, have been bought by Fox Searchlight for development into a feature film. Glyn’s opera libretti include The Lion’s Face (for Elena Langer), Seven Angels (for Luke Bedford), The Firework Maker’s Daughter and Nothing (for David Bruce) and, for OperaUpClose in 2017, The Magic Flute.
Laura Bowler, described as “a triple threat composer-performer provocatrice” (The Arts Desk) is a composer, vocalist and Artistic Director specialising in theatre, multidisciplinary work and opera. She has been commissioned across the globe by ensembles and orchestras including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, ROH2, Opera Holland Park, The Opera Group, Manchester Camerata, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Quatuor Bozzini
Featuring recordings of community singing groups from across the UK alongside a cast of world-renowned opera singers and players, this is intensely powerful and involved musical storytelling bringing The Flying Dutchman to life as an urgent, contemporary tale for our times.
Useful information
Venue: Brunel One, Great Eastern Hall, Brunel’s SS Great Britain Great Western Dockyard, Bristol BS1 6TY
Running Time: 135 minutes (plus interval) | Suitable for ages 12+
Photo credit: Alex Brenner
