Opera, up close and personal

10 April 2012

When friends tell you they're heading to a Hackney warehouse for the evening, the natural assumption might be that they are preparing themselves for a night of debauched partying.

So it will come as a surprise when they correct you by saying: "No, tonight we're going to the opera, darling."

Yet that is precisely what hordes of Hackneyites are heading to this week - to see Go Traviata!, a digestible production of Verdi's La Traviata, staged in a secret Hackney Wick warehouse but set in 19th-century Paris.

The 85-minute production by the Go Opera company runs until Saturday, and the £10 tickets have sold out.

"We got sick and tired of people claiming that opera was boring," says creative producer Elly Condron. Along with her co-producer Dominic Kraemer, she wanted to find a way of bringing opera to the "culturally curious, who weren't readily inclined to go down the opera route, by putting it in a warehouse and having it up close and personal - with the audience in the body of the action."

The audience stands up, can move around the room and drinks and food are handed out.

But Go Opera is not the only company to have this idea. In March, an innovative production of La Bohème by OperaUpClose won the Olivier Award for best new opera.

With its modernised version, set in Kilburn, performed by young singers and first staged in Kilburn's Cock Tavern pub, it took opera out of its usual setting and shoved it into the middle of an audience drinking in a bar.

Last year, experimental theatre group Punchdrunk teamed up with the English National Opera to create a version of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, in which the audience could walk around the empty office-block building and encounter and follow different characters.

Now, continuing the trend, OperaUpClose is presenting its latest production of Mozart's Don Giovanni at the Soho Theatre - but instead of a nobleman, Giovanni is a City trader, and his servant Leporello is portrayed as an intern.

Meanwhile, 22-year-old Daisy Evans directed the world's first Silent Opera in March - a production of Dido and Aeneas, in which the audience followed singers around railway tunnels at London Bridge, listening through headphones.

And from June 22 to July 16, guerrilla opera The Secret Consul, a story about the bureaucracy of immigration, takes over a secret location in Limehouse with a multinational chorus from London's refugee population. Together they're all turning opera trendy.

"I don't care if no opera people at all come along," says The Secret Consul director Stephen Tiller.

"I'd far rather that people from Shoreditch and Hoxton and also refugees come to see it.

"I love spaces and I'm bored with theatres such as the National, where everybody there has a blue rinse.

"With this [The Secret Consul] it becomes an adventure," he says. "Our website is full of feedback from people saying things like: 'I hate opera, but I loved this,' and that is the point."

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