Verdi it ain’t. It is June 2009 and on the stage at the Opera House in Rome the set for Le Grand Macabre by Gy?rgy Ligeti consists of a 20ft-high fibreglass anatomically accurate naked woman called Claudia, half-squatting, half-sprawling. As the performance progresses there are passionate jeers from the stalls. “You suck!”, “Bring back Verdi!” and further unprintable abuse. Fisticuffs do not break out, but the audience is clearly divided between those for and against this eye-poppingly radical vision. I’ve been to football matches less heated than this.
But then controversy is nothing new to the creative team behind this co-production between the English National Opera, Rome, Th?âtre de La Monnaie in Brussels and Barcelona’s Gran Teatro del Liceu. The controversial Catalan group La Fura Dels Baus has been making outrageously breathtaking performance-based art for 30 years, and while this is its first UK opera, it moved into this area a decade ago on the Continent and has overseen works such as Faust, The Magic Flute and The Ring Cycle elsewhere in Europe.
Three months on, the cast and crew are in Three Mills Studios in East London, rehearsing for their six-night run at the Coliseum. Sadly, most of “Claudia” is absent. It took four juggernauts to bring her over from the Continent and most of her 62 parts are being assembled in the Coliseum. But her cavernous bare bottom is in the corner; it opens up to reveal a booze-stocked bar and is integral to a party scene in the plot. As are other parts. Many of the performers enter and exit via various orifices. “I go into a bosom,” says Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke, who plays drunken everyman Piet the Pot.
The co-directors Alex Olle and Valentina Carrasco are in good humour, chuckling over the heckling incident in Rome. Olle, who co-founded La Fura 30 years ago as Barcelona street entertainers, smokes intensely. Carrasco is more easygoing, but then she has only been with the company for a decade. Maybe 30 years of confrontational performance would make anyone intense.
Olle sips his lager and reflects on the behaviour of the Rome audience. Contrary to expectations, this group, which likes to use blood, mud and gore in shows and was last in London in 2003 with XXX, an adaptation of the Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom, in which prosthetic genitals co-starred, is not into calculated outrage: “It’s not about shocking. It is not what we are about. We want the audience to talk about the opera, not the shock.”
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The group certainly chose the right piece for that. Early in 2008 La Fura was approached to collaborate with ENO on the Hungarian composer Ligeti’s seminal “anti-antiopera”, written in the Seventies. The result is a heavenly marriage of surreal music and technically brilliant visuals. The story, based on a Belgian book by Michel De Ghelderode, follows the people of “Breugelland” as they face their last night on Earth. A sinister scythe-waving figure called Nekrotzar has arrived to tell them that the world will be destroyed at midnight. What follows is a mixture of sex, violence and unbridled hedonism as the townsfolk consider their fate. There is also a healthy streak of humour. Nekrotzar rides a space hopper, dominatrix Mescalina — breasts on display — rams a giant syringe into her husband’s rear.
La Fura may not want to shock, but its work certainly has a visceral effect. Le Grand Macabre opens with film of the real Claudia over-indulging on pizza and fizzy drinks and passing out in a trashy apartment before the model of Claudia emerges onstage. The Barcelona-based team likes to tap into our fears of mortality and this was how it came up with the idea of the body as the elaborate, haunting stage set.
“We were thinking that you are not afraid of the end of the world, you are afraid of yourself dying. You don’t care about the Eiffel Tower, you care about yourself,” says Carrasco. “We like to work with fear so we thought of this body in a state of chaos. The chaos of the body reflects the chaos of the opera. Then we thought of the paintings of Breugel and Bosch and how they have body parts in them and we incorporated that idea.” Throughout the performance “Claudia” ingeniously rotates and splits open to create different fleshy locations. Performers ooze from her intestines. Striking video effects transform her into a skeleton or a monster.
The cast has changed for the London opening, hence further rehearsals as they are pushed to the absolute limit. Sometimes they have to balance on Claudia while delivering their lines and sing while on a harness. “I hate heights,” says Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke. Susanna Andersson, who plays Venus, did not realise she had to be suspended above the stage when she signed up. “They sent me a DVD, but it was a European format and wouldn’t play on my laptop!” But she was happy to do anything to be in the production, “except appear naked”.
For ENO the choice of La Fura is clearly an attempt to sex up opera and attract a new, younger audience. Film fans will know Ligeti’s eerie, angular style from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut. And ENO already has a strong track record for cultural cross-fertilisation: it commissioned the late Anthony Minghella to direct Madame Butterfly and teamed up with the left-field theatre company Improbable. In 2010 it will collaborate with Punchdrunk Theatre, which produced the acclaimed The Masque of the Red Death.
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But the mix of La Fura and Ligeti is certainly a bold way to open the new season. La Fura, which often originates its own work, was more than happy to stick closely to the text. “The play itself is so good,” says Carrasco, “absurd, but such a gift. It’s a relief to be able to work freely without going away from the work, rather than, say, setting The Marriage of Figaro in a discotheque.
“At the moment the most interesting things you see on stage are in opera, not in theatre. When we were offered this piece it was super-great. Along with Bart?k’s Bluebeard’s Castle, this is the best 20th-century opera written. Ligeti is very funny. The orchestra constantly comments on the action. Like when Mescalina puts the syringe in Astradamors’s a*** the music goes ‘bonk’. There are clown noises and the prelude is car horns.”
Using an existing work is strangely liberating for the group. “It is like a balloon. You have air in a balloon and the balloon is compressing the air, but it is also giving it shape, otherwise it would not be a balloon,” says Carrasco. She is convinced that Ligeti, who died in 2006, would have approved, even though he was a stickler for detail and hated Peter Sellars’s 1997 Salzburg production because he believed it strayed too far from his intentions. ENO itself has a good reputation with the work, having given its UK premiere in the Eighties.
This still feels like a very conventional opera piece for La Fura. It is difficult to see quite what got the Rome crowd so worked up. Previous projects have involved the audience far more directly, drawing the viewer intimately into the production with promenade performances. The conventional opera house location seems restrictive — though at the time of writing the group was thinking of ways around this, possibly putting some of the chorus in the stalls. For Olle having a seated audience was another challenge: “You want to build a relationship with an audience, not just push them around!” Maybe there is a way to involve the audience more in future productions. Carrasco recalls the outraged Opera House in Rome back in June. “In the interval the shouting started again. Someone shouted ‘Arsehole’, then someone shouted back ‘Bastard’. Then the performance started again and the first scene was two politicians insulting each other in alphabetical order (‘blackmailer, bloodsucker, charlatan, clodhopper’). We were thinking we might make the audience insults part of the show.”
Le Grand Macabre, London Coliseum, WC2, 0871 9110200, from September 17