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Benjamin Britten at Glyndebourne in 1946
Benjamin Britten at Glyndebourne in 1946, the year his opera premiered there. Photograph: Glyndebourne
Benjamin Britten at Glyndebourne in 1946, the year his opera premiered there. Photograph: Glyndebourne

Britten's Rape of Lucretia: a director's diary

This article is more than 10 years old
With days to go before Glyndebourne opens only its second staging of the Britten chamber opera it premiered, director Fiona Shaw reflects on bravery, burial and layers of darkness

Thursday 3 October 2013For some weeks now, I've been staying at Glyndebourne to rehearse Britten's strange opera, The Rape of Lucretia. The opera house has always been unique in that the entire creative team – repetiteurs, conductors, directors and assistants – stay in the house while working on a production. So, surrounded by the South Downs, I sleep in a canopied four-poster bed that traps my dreams –
and my loo has a commode chair framing it! The Rape of Lucretia had its world premiere here in 1946, with Kathleen Ferrier as Lucretia. Sixty-something years later, we're rehearsing it for only the second time in this opera house's history.

Friday 4 October
In the evening, Gus Christie, Glyndebourne's chairman, hosts a dinner for all 22 of the household. I sit next to his father, Sir George, who regales me with tales of his time as chairman: how he built the new opera house, and knocked down the old one in "a couple of afternoons"; how he nearly got Maria Callas here before she priced herself out; how he heard the original production of Lucretia when he was 12, and has not seen it since.

In the war years, evacuees slept in the Old Green Room, which became a dorm. Recently, letters were found under the floorboards left by those kids terrified by bombers targeting the south coast. Those same planes woke the suicidal Virginia Woolf, who lived down the road. The opera holds much of this disquiet. Britten had visited Bergen-Belsen concentration camp the year before; every beat reveals how affected he was.

Today was a long one, spent running scenes together. There are sometimes three concurrent and differing stories: that of the Male and Female Chorus (who, in Ronald Duncan's libretto, are the Christian interpreters of the "pagan" story); there's the viewpoint offered by Lucretia's two servants who, in my production, are omnipresent; and there's the main story of the rape.

Saturday 5 October
Today is our first chance to light some of the scenes without the singers. On Monday, there is the Sitzprobe [the first rehearsal with the orchestra] and I shall wander around like a mother sheep bleating for the singers to be released to get back to the rehearsal pen in the afternoon. We are at that transition moment: all the exploration of the rehearsal room begins to lock into a working reality – and final decisions have to be made.

Tuesday 8 October
A testing morning. The tent, the set for the army camp scene, won't fall over when it's supposed to – the tent pegs have the wrong kind of string, and then the lights fall and break.

Designer Michael Levine has created a black stage with black earth (bits of it are being found all over Glyndebourne by the cleaners each morning.) The idea of excavation and burial runs throughout: the story is hidden beneath layers and has to be excavated by the Chorus and the audience. To get to Rome and Lucretia, Tarquinius has to physically dig down through the earth, and the dark desert of the army camp gives way to a whiter, stiller world of the becalmed ladies waiting like Penelope for the return of their men. The Female Chorus tries to delay the crisis, willing the household not to wake. "Sleep on Lucretia," she begs.

Fiona Shaw
Fiona Shaw: 'the parsimoniousness that haunted Britain's postwar years clings to the work'. Photograph: Felix Clay for the Guardian

Thursday 10 October
The trees turn marmalade and, as I run up the hills in the morning, I see deer and foxes and rabbits. After a further week of stage work with the piano, we have the orchestra again. It strikes me that the parsimoniousness that haunted Britain's postwar years clings to the work, with its chamber orchestra of just 13 players and cast of eight singers. Glyndebourne's archivist told us the original costumes had to be bought with hundreds of clothing coupons, and the performers shared a bar of soap that was measured nightly to see how much was gone. Lucky our own shower gel isn't being rationed – the soldiers are getting pretty dirty in that black earth.

Picking up the postwar feeling does make one see how brave Britten's opera was. It is about a rape in many senses, not just of Lucretia, but of her marriage so brutally and carelessly destroyed; while her choice to leave her husband (and child in this production) in death rapes the future. But, hidden is the complexity that marks Britten's genius. Lucretia's rejection is of what she actually desires – she has always seen Tarquinius as "a tiger". This latent desire, and the terror that it might be summoned out, is part of the human condition, a dark part of the mind countered by Lucretia's beautiful duet with her husband, suggesting they might forget the rape and return to their happy life. Britten's sublime music enforces the agony of her suicide that follows.

In early rehearsals, we invented stories for the Male and Female Chorus that included their marriage. This allows them to have a more personal relationship with the story, as they move around the walls of the Roman world. But the story begins to diverge from their telling, and soon events overwhelm everyone on the stage as the people in the Roman world are driven by their own forces.

The choruses have to deal with the chaos, and hold old-fashioned Christianity as their shield. But the opera concludes with the perplexing question: "Is this it all?" What do we do when there is no meaning, how do we go on? Britten's opera was very much of his – and our – time.

Glyndebourne Touring Opera's production of Rape of Lucretia opens at Glyndebourne on 19 October, and tours until 6 December

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