Gary McCann: Visceral experience of opera about images and music burnt into the memory

Portadown-born opera designer Gary McCann describes his young self as having had “this sort of freakish interest in classical music”. He was, he tells me, “living in a very ordinary place, going to a very ordinary school”. But at the age of eight, “I got my parents to buy me Wagner tapes. The warning signs were already there, I think.”

It was probably inevitable then that, once he established himself as a theatre designer, he would set his sights on opera. “In about 2005,” he explains, “I made a concerted effort to get into opera, because I felt my work always had a kind of operatic sweep to it or interest in it. People always said it was very operatic when they’d see my set designs. So I thought well, yes. That’s a medium for me.”

His first big operatic job was Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus at the National Opera in Oslo. It was, he says, “very wacky” and “people noticed that”. His career since then has taken him all over the world, and when we connect over Zoom, he’s in the canteen of Teatro La Fenice in Venice, working on the theatre’s first-ever production of Britten’s Peter Grimes, having already spent most of the year working in Italy, in Florence and Bologna.

I ask him about the difference between designing for theatre and for opera. The first big difference, he says, is words. “Working in a theatre production, the text is the king. We’re all focused on the playwright’s intentions, the details, the nuances, the subtexts of the writing.”

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In an opera, he explains, “the words are a bit of an irrelevance. It might be in Russian, or Czech or Italian. It might be quite repetitive. So the text itself doesn’t have any enormous value. What does have enormous value is the music, and also the visual interpretation of that music, how you manifest that audio world in a visual manner.”

He feels there is greater responsibility attached to his role in opera. “In a play you might be more focused on details of the space, the entrances, the exits, the historical context. In an opera, that’s important, but there are a lot of other, bigger considerations.”

The world of opera, he says, “feels less hierarchical than a theatrical context”, talking primarily about relationships with directors. But, more than once, he draws attention to the fact that his work is anything but a solo run, and that he depends on the teams of people who physically bring his ideas into being.

“I’m lucky,” he says, “in so much as the people I work with trust me to make those first steps in terms of conceptualising what the production might be. How do you take a piece of music and translate that into something concrete? How do I go about developing these worlds? I feel my job is a visual storyteller. I’m telling the story of the opera through images. The images and the music are the things that get burned into people’s memories. It’s not the words. Nobody’s going to go home and think, ‘Oh, that was a lovely turn of phrase’ in Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra. They’re going to remember what it sounded like and they’re going to remember the production that they saw, as a kind of visceral experience.”

Next he talks of “the stylisation of the world of opera. We’re not watching an episode of EastEnders. People aren’t coming into the pub and saying, ‘Hi, how are you? Would you like a pint of bitter?’ They’re singing at each other” – he imbues the word “singing” with a sense of amazement.

“So we’re already in a very strange world, where people are expressing themselves through sound and expressing emotion through sound. And we have the extraordinary skills of the people who are capable of making these noises. It’s not real life. It’s a kind of version of real life and it’s dealing with things – religion, death, sex, all the things that we all experience, or suffer or are interested in during our lifetimes – but they are communicated in a stylised way. So, as a designer, there has to be some sense of reality that’s also that of an imaginary world, because the stylisation of the music and the way people are expressing themselves requires a visual counterpart to that.”

I point out that he’s not a direct hire. It’s the directors who are hired by companies. “That’s totally true,” he replies. “The director will always get invited and they will bring their team.” But he says that people will often just invite him out of the blue, “because they’ll have seen something of mine and possibly build a production around my involvement”.

When I ask about constraints, he talks about “this soup of design”. He elaborates, “the company I’m working for, what their aesthetic is, what the intendant wants who’s engaged us to work there, the culture of the country I’m working in. If I’m doing a project in Germany, it’s going to be very different to doing the same piece in America. I wouldn’t consciously think ‘I must do something different’. I would just automatically think about what they’re looking for – that’s the culture, that’s the audience, there’s a different set of expectations there. There are all sorts of considerations. I don’t see myself as having lots of limitations. I see myself as having lots of options and lots of amazing people to collaborate with.”

And he’s very aware of the special circumstances of opera. “From a budgetary point of view there are limitations. But, you know, I always have six-figure budgets, and sometimes I have seven-figure budgets. So there are serious resources for me to work with. I have to pinch myself sometimes. Because as an artist – I consider myself an artist – I have these very large canvases.”

Regarding his designs for Tosca, a co-production between Opera Wrocławska and Irish National Opera, he says, “I’m always a little bit sniffy about Puccini. I always think it’s not my thing. It is a little bit sentimental. And then I work on it and I think, ‘This is fucking brilliant!’”

For Tosca, with a tight plot of love, murder and religion in a police state, he has chosen to update the setting from the early 19th century to the middle of the 20th. In the absence of historic costumes, “We’re seeing people who are like our parents. Automatically, I find, there’s more of a connection to the narrative in doing that. The 1940s and 1950s are quite good, because society hadn’t really massively evolved, in the way that it transformed in the 1960s, let’s say. So we’re still looking at a slightly old-fashioned, moralistic world where women were treated differently than they are today. It’s a useful point of context for audiences to see things in the middle of the 20th century. We can just about make the storyline work in terms of people’s behaviour and their relationships. But it feels modern.”

With director Michael Gieleta, he came up with the idea of presenting a Rome that has been destroyed in a war. “I thought, what if we have this modernist world, this brutalist architecture, maybe a bit Soviet or a bit like Italian brutalism, Italian rationalist architecture. Which offers us this very slab-like, monolithic, brutal space. But within this war-torn architectural world we embed large fragments of the baroque era. So we have a big baroque altarpiece, or a big angel statue or a fresco which has been salvaged from a baroque palace.”

He describes the conflicting styles as being “totally at odds with each other. And in some way it really encapsulates for me the way the church is depicted in the opera. Puccini depicts the church as a very severe, ruthless, brutal, nasty organisation. You can’t pretend it’s anything other than that. So, to have beautiful bits of baroque architecture, with all of the detail and filigree and gold leaf, and to see those marooned in these severe spaces, for me was the key that unlocked the whole production.”

The set is dominated by a huge cross. “It’s 12 or 13 or 14 metres wide and weighs two tonnes” – he means that literally. “It’s like a giant sword of Damocles that is hovering over the stage. Again, it’s depicting religion as an oppressive force rather than something which is setting people free.” It changes position during the opera. “We have this rather lofty space in the first act, which is the church, and this much more concentrated space for Scarpia’s office – the crucifix drops by two metres – and then in the third act it tilts around and creates this aggressive perspective for the final fort scene.”

The cross, he points out, is also “a great acoustic baffle. A lot of my work has ceilings. It has hard surfaces. It has raked stages. It has big flat walls.” That’s all about making a more favourable acoustic environment for the singers. “I’m not a sound engineer, but I know what works in terms of bouncing out the sound. And it’s things like that which really help the singers. I’ve done it so many times, I sort of do it automatically.” Expect that, too, in McCann’s next show for INO, Richard Strauss’s sumptuous Der Rosenkavalier, next March.

Puccini’s Tosca is at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre between Monday, July 11th and Sunday 17th. www.irishnationalopera.ie