The Production

“I certainly don’t want the production to hide behind the 18th century. You have to climb forward and deal with your own time. Theatre must always make things present to the viewer, but at the same time it must acknowledge where it has come from.”

Fiona Shaw on The Marriage of Figaro as quoted in The Independent

This production of The Marriage of Figaro was first seen in 2011 and has been revived twice at ENO. Director Fiona Shaw wanted to present a staging of the work that speaks to contemporary audiences.
 
Below is an extract from a conversation with Director Fiona Shaw and journalist Edward Seckerson:

FS: My job is to try and get the singers to be true to our generation as we watch Figaro. The relationships should be recognisable. I thought about placing the opera in a modern context. This was my instinct because Da Ponte and Mozart were trying to strike a modern discord in their moment. But you cannot be modern with an opera that is fundamentally based on the right of the lord to sleep with his servant– the droit de seigneur. This stopped after the French Revolution. So one has to make an onstage context: men and women have to be trapped in houses run by men who have this right. To show this, we chose to make the setting both a house and a maze, and in the middle of the maze lives the Minotaur, who is the Count. Whenever the maze turns you see the back corridors, which the servants inhabit. There is a parallel universe going on all the time. We also have staircases either side that lead nowhere. I’ve always felt that the brain looks like a maze: our minds are both unlimited and yet always knocking against the passages of our own limitations.

 
ES: How much does the addition of music change the dynamic of how you work as a director and how people perform as actors and singers?
 
FS: As a play, I would have been daunted by it because of the speed at which the action goes by. In a play, the action is usually heading towards a comic or tragic ending. But this opera seems full of little endings in itself – it’s a Rubik’s cube. The recitatives are full of action. I have also introduced action into the arias, treating them like recitatives. An aria occurs when the emotion is high enough that it could not be spoken. Sometimes in the opera you think people shouldn’t be singing and they still are; they’re talking about whether you should go in the door or out the door. It’s always because there is an anxiety in the music. It’s not a day of splendour but a day of anxiety, on which a lot of comedies and tragedies are built.
An image of Sarah Jane Brandon and Benedict Nelson in Fiona Shaw's 2014 production of The Marriage of Figaro View 8 images An image of Colin Judson, Mary Bevan and Benedict Nelson in Fiona Shaw's 2014 production of The Marriage of Figaro An image of Mary Bevan in Fiona Shaw's 2014 production of The Marriage of Figaro An image of Sarah Jane Brandon, Benedict Nelson and Mary Bevan in Fiona Shaw's 2014 production of The Marriage of Figaro An image of Mary Bevan in Fiona Shaw's 2014 production of The Marriage of Figaro An image of Mary Bevan and David Stout in Fiona Shaw's 2014 production of The Marriage of Figaro An image of Sarah Jane Brandon in Fiona Shaw's 2014 production of The Marriage of Figaro An image of Benedict Nelson, Mary Bevan, Sarah Jane Brandon and David Stout in Fiona Shaw's 2014 production of The Marriage of Figaro

Photo Gallery

The Set

Fiona Shaw worked with designer Peter McKintosh to conceive a claustrophobic design for the house. They wanted to portray an environment where characters are trapped by the hereditary rights of the Count. The set contains white partitions outlining the walls and corridors and is built into a revolving stage. This allows the audience to see scenes happening simultaneously in different rooms. The effect produces a maze of walls, staircases and corridors, running up and down between the different section of the house. As the set begins to move, the viewer is never quite sure what is going to be revealed next. This unusual design also reflects Beaumarchais’s contrast between the behaviour allowed ‘upstairs’ and ‘downstairs’. The clean, modern design contrasts with the use of eighteen-century period costumes. This suggests the arrival of a new, more equal world as the century is swept up into revolution.
 
The London Coliseum was home to the very first revolving stage in a British theatre. The original 1904 revolve was powered by electricity on the same grid as the trams on St. Martin’s Lane. When the trams stopped, so did the revolve. This mechanism is now obsolete and is buried into the ceiling of the building’s canteen. A new revolve was built for Fiona Shaw’s 2011 Figaro production. The combined weight of the wall panels and stair partitions is 4172.5 kg.. over 4 tonnes.
 
ENO is a repertory house, with three opera productions presented in rotation at any one time. Between performances the entire set is dismantled and stored in the wings while another production set is brought on stage.