One of the drawbacks of working on a new opera is that you throw all your creative energy into a piece of which you are immensely proud – the sense of ownership of a role that only you in the whole world know is absolute – while accepting that it is most likely to be a one-off. Very few new operas are scheduled for another season, and unless the production can be sold to another opera house, the role that has your name on it may well be shelved until further notice.
In 2013, I took on the challenge of creating Peter Pan in Richard Ayres’s brand-new opera, with a libretto by poet Lavinia Greenlaw. It had its world premiere performances in Stuttgart, and was well received – it’s already due for revival there next season. And I’ve been lucky. These last few months I’ve been able to revisit and reinvent the role of Peter in a new co-production of the work for Welsh National Opera.
The Stuttgart version differs enormously from the one that opens in Cardiff on 16 May. The most startling thing is that now I have to speak, not just sing! In fact Peter, attempting to revive the poisoned Tinkerbell, addresses the audience directly, inviting them to become participants in the live performance. This seems to me as momentous for opera as the same moment was for the original play when it was first performed over 110 years ago. It is something that makes me very nervous, but is right for such a heritage piece, performed to a British audience, respectfully acknowledging its great theatrical tradition.
Here at WNO, Keith Warner is directing the new production. I feel very privileged in this – when you revisit a role you could hardly ask for a better person to help you do so. Warner has made a career of working with the greatest Wagnerians – singers who by and large perform the same handful of roles repeatedly over many years – and is skilled in helping them ask new questions, come up with fresh ideas and reinvent their roles with greater understanding.
The new Cardiff version of Peter feels a bit older than his Stuttgart counterpart. He feels more dangerous, animalistic and certainly more brutal, and harder to like. And yet through his faults and imperfections, I think Peter becomes more recognisably three-dimensional and as such, a character you could embrace as you would your own child – something for which he yearns, but would never admit.
The personal – and physical – challenges are immense. There aren’t many operas that have a “flight director”. Our production’s “fight and flight director” Ran Braun asked me the other day what it felt like to be the opera singer with the most logged flight hours in Europe, if not the world. I felt like saying “you mean apart from wrecked and exhausted?!” but his question made me realise what we have in fact achieved through all those hours and hours of experimentation and hard work. I now have a healthy repertoire of aerial flips and stunts, and have also learned how to sing upside down and while walking up walls!
Apart from anything else, working on this production with WNO is special on so many personal levels. My grandfather was a valleys man, from the Rhondda town of Tonypandy, and as a child I spent time here in south Wales. He was also a staff sergeant in the army, and being in Cardiff for VE Day last week felt particularly poignant. I myself was born and grew up in London in the same neighbourhood as Peter Pan. I spent my childhood in the then unfashionable Notting Hill Gate and would regularly cycle round the same Kensington Gardens where JM Barrie strolled. I know the precise island, in the middle of the lake where Peter was “born”. The surrounding architecture of Victorian terraced houses is largely unchanged today.
As the show tours, first to Birmingham and then to the Royal Opera House in London, I feel that I too am flying back through the window and coming home, in so many ways.
- Peter Pan is at Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, 16, 23 and 31 May. Box office: 029 2063 6464. Then at Birmingham Hippodrome, 11 June. Box office: 0844 338 5000. Then at the Royal Opera House, London, on 24 and 25 July. Box office: 020-7304 4000. Follow Iestyn Morris on twitter at @iestyncounter
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