‘They are all gone now, and there isn’t anything more the sea can do to me.’ – Riders to the Sea

The show will bring together music, projections and theatre as there will be choral recordings layered over the live music and the musicians will be on stage with the singers, building on this element of OUC’s approach to their shows which was a big part of their version of The Flying Dutchman from last year.

The composer Edmund Rubbra characterised Riders to the Sea as less an opera than a “spoken drama raised in emotional power and expressiveness to the nth degree” The story concerns Maurya, an elderly Irishwoman, who has lost her husband, father-in-law, and four of her six sons at sea. In the opera her fifth son, Michael, is feared lost and the sixth and last son, Bartley, is planning to go to Galway fair to sell horses. Maurya sees a vision of the ghost of Michael riding behind Bartley, and Bartley’s corpse is brought on. The opera ends with a long lament from Maurya where she comes to terms with her loss.

Full details from the OperaUpClose website.

Here, director Flora McIntosh and composer Michael Betteridge discuss the opera.

Flora McIntosh, Artistic Director of OperaUpClose and Director of Riders to the Sea

Why Riders to the Sea? 

When OperaUpClose moved to Southampton we were really keen to explore music and stories that reflected the environment and community we were now part of. Stories of and from the sea led me to Riders to the Sea. What struck me immediately was how much more than the sum of its parts this piece is  – ostensibly a very specific story of a small place, it actually holds huge universal themes of love, grief and home that speak to the core of our humanity. So it is both small and intimate, and epic and mighty – perfect for OperaUpClose. Riders to the Sea is just 40 minutes long in its original form; I saw this as a brilliant opportunity for reinventing and reframing a classic work through commissioning new writing that could illuminate, enhance and expand the original material. And through this reinvention a totally different approach to the narrative has emerged – it’s been a true process of exploration and discovery, one which I’m excited to share.

Do you need to know much about the play or opera to enjoy the show? 

I would say, hand on heart, you don’t need to know anything in advance. Just like you don’t need to know anything about a film you might choose to watch, or a book you might choose to read. Sung in English and with captions throughout, there are multiple layers of storytelling going on in this production using sound, video, words, movement…I really hope everyone takes something different from it, there is no ‘right’ way.

This is your directorial debut at OperaUpClose, how are you feeling about that? 

Well, I guess the most honest response would be excited, privileged and appropriately terrified! What I have found most rewarding is the bringing together of an exceptional team. When I say privileged, I mean it, working with these brilliant artists is the best; but also directing for OperaUpClose demands a distilling of narrative and  a refocusing of characters which enables a special kind of intensity. There’s nowhere to hide – it’s a thrilling new creative muscle to flex.

This production again (like last year’s The Flying Dutchman) has no pit so the orchestra is on stage with actors, why is presenting your shows in this way important to you? 

So much storytelling in opera is told through sound. The instrumental players and the colours and textures they provide are key to the narrative and always so much more than an accompaniment to the singers. Performing at an intimate scale gives us an amazing opportunity to rethink the instruments as key characters in the piece. All the characters speak, just some speak through their instruments and some through their song. Taking this approach dismantles the barrier that a pit can sometimes create – the audience aren’t just receiving the story, they are in it. And our approach to reinvention, not reduction, means we are able to make really strong, contemporary artistic choices that take the classics into a new place for new audiences.

The show mixes recordings and projections with live music and singing. As a director, how do you bring all these elements together?

Yes, it is quite complicated. The key is ensuring you have brilliant people facilitating their area of expertise…I’m lucky, this production is an embarrassment of talent! Bringing those people together in shared purpose and being clear that we are all telling the same story is what my job is really about. Each element weaves together and integrates to create a multi-media, multi-sensory theatrical world that serves the music and drama but never distracts.

Tell us about the captioning in the show 

Broadening access to opera and removing the barriers that exist is so important. The approach to captioning integrates the text into the very fabric of the production through font, design and animation so the written word becomes a narrative device that can enhance everybody’s experience of the piece. Integrating the captions this way means that no audience member has to take themselves out of the action if they need/want to read the words – it’s all part of one story and a truly multi-sensory experience.

Riders to the Sea is stopping in eight UK locations, why is touring important to the company? 

Touring is central to our activity as a company  – making work locally and touring it nationally allows us to connect with communities and experience a brilliant diversity of response. Particularly working at this scale, we are able to take opera to places that rarely get to experience the art form; and by going to these multiple locations we can truly champion opera as a live, vibrant theatrical experience that can speak directly and powerfully to all audiences.

What do you hope audiences will take from the show? 

This is always such a difficult question – audiences always take something different than you imagine they might, and I embrace that. But I hope that some take away an experience that has changed their view of what opera can be and who it is for. And I hope they are given an opportunity to reflect on the great, agonising and beautiful truth that grief is the price we pay for love, nothing is ever really lost and there is always a path to the light.

Michael Betteridge, composer 

How did you become involved in music?

Neither of my parents were particularly engaged with music when I was growing up, but my Mum did buy a really cheap out of tune (but beautiful!) piano to ‘have around the house’. I was enamoured with it from a young age and my parents were kind enough to support piano lessons. I never intended to go into music professionally, especially as it never felt like a secure career choice, but around the age of 16 when doing work experience I realised it was something I just had to do. I studied at the University of Manchester and really fell in love with music.

How did you get involved in the project?

I was involved as one of the community choral leaders for one of OperaUpClose’s previous projects The Flying Dutchman and, around the same time, Flora came to see a semi-staged song cycle of mine called Voices of the Sands. The themes in that work, as well as mine and Flora’s shared passion for opening up creative processes in opera to all, I think – if memory serves (!) – led to Flora inviting me on to this project, which I leapt on, of course!

How daunting and fun was it to work with Ralph Vaughan Williams’s score?

Very daunting! It’s a particularly challenging score to rework, especially as it’s a very harmonically rich piece and to reduce that to only a few instruments means tough choices sometimes have to be made. It was Flora’s idea to use an accordion, and I’m so glad she did, otherwise I think it would have lost a lot the flavour of the original. I’ve been very faithful with the arrangement, it’s definitely a reduction, as opposed to a total re-working. However, the original orchestration is huge and even with my faithfulness to it, the new arrangement, I hope, feels very fresh to the ears. This size of ensemble also allows for real intimacy and dynamic contrast that the original does a good job of, but is tricky with such large instrumental forces.

The choir you set up The Sunday Boys have recorded some audio for the show, how do you go about merging pre-recorded audio with a live score?

Good question! It’s not easy! Matt Fairclough has been our audio engineer on the project and we had experience of doing this together on the previous production I mentioned above, The Flying Dutchman. There are lots of ways of merging live and pre-recorded, and some of this will be worked out in the rehearsal room, but our plan is to provide the instrumentalists with a click-track for the moments they need to sync with the prerecord. A sound engineer will trigger the click at the appropriate moments. This will allow for the live musicians to work freely when all the music is live – which is generally a more desirable way of working – and then sync up perfectly with the pre-record when needed.

The show is touring to eight UK locations, what do you hope audiences will take from the production?

Riders to the Sea is such an unusual piece because it is much more a ‘sung play’ as opposed to a grand opera. Our version has really leant into this concept and the reduced orchestration allows for the intimate moments to be even more intense. But, for me, it’s the universal themes of family, home, and grief that come to the fore in this work. We all have such different relationships with these three ideas and every member of the audience will experience and interpret the piece in vastly different ways. That’s the beauty of this work and I hope it gives audiences that opportunity to reflect.

What projects do you have in the pipeline?

I actually have another opera touring at the same time as this one! It’s very different: written for English Touring Opera, it’s an opera for children called The Vanishing Forest with words by Jonathan Ainscough and is a sort of sequel to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I am also waiting to hear whether I have funding for a new Anglo-Icelandic dance opera called She Spoke Ashes that explores gesture and rhetoric in politics. If we are successful this will hopefully go into production in summer 2025 and open in Reykjavik. Watch this space!