Emma Rice is rehearsing the third act of her riotous new version of Jacques Offenbach’s opera Orpheus in the Underworld. Eurydice, played by Mary Bevan, is imprisoned in a celestial boudoir while the gods jostle to have their wicked way with her. Within minutes, the captivating heroine is frolicking on a bed – with a fly. She is rapturously unaware that the insect is Jupiter’s alter ego, and that the god is looming lustfully over her. “When I wiggle my bum, my little wings begin to hum,” sings Willard White as the uber-deity, with a pert little shimmy of his hips.
It’s all very silly but also more than a little bit creepy, not least because Jupiter looks old enough to be Eurydice’s grandfather. Given that the fly is a puppet that buzzes around on the end of a stick, it’s also very Emma Rice. But is it Offenbach? That is the question opera-goers will be asking as they head to English National Opera for this second instalment of a season investigating the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.
Rice answers the question of faithfulness with two words: “Which text?” After agreeing to take on the production, the director found herself with nine different versions on CD. “There isn’t a definitive text. Offenbach himself did a two-act version and a four-act one, and there have been many other interpretations, so what I didn’t have was a clear starting point. I was thinking, ‘Bloody hell, how do I get through this?’ It would be easier if I knew how to read a score.”
Rice took her anxieties off on holiday with her partner, and together they managed to track down an old libretto in the original French. “So we decided to Google Translate it.” But far from solving the problem, it was immediately clear that what they had found wasn’t fit for her purposes.
Offenbach, she explains, created his celebrated operetta partly as a riposte to the longueurs of romantic opera. Far from being a star-crossed lover, his violin-playing Orpheus can’t wait to get rid of Eurydice, who hates his music and is only too happy to console herself with a shepherd. “I was quite horrified by some of the words I found there,” says Rice. “There was a lot of non-consensual love and it began with a marriage that’s entirely loveless. It certainly wasn’t something I had much connection with, so I started restructuring it into a narrative I could believe in.”
This won’t surprise long-term followers of Rice’s career. Though a newcomer to opera, she has long been a controversial figure in UK theatre, revered and derided with equal fervour. She made her name with the Cornish touring company Kneehigh, whose philosophy of “joyful anarchy” landed her in trouble more than once in big institutions, not least while director of Shakespeare’s Globe. Two seasons in, she resigned after a high-profile falling-out with its board over her insistence on being allowed to do her own thing, using stage lighting and amplified sound in contravention of the theatre’s founding principles.
Opinions were split between those who felt she was wrecking the Globe and others who argued that, in rejecting her vision, the venue had proved itself not so much a theatre as “part of the heritage industry and a plaything for academic researchers”. Rice responded with an impassioned open letter, writing: “I chose to leave because, as important and beloved as the Globe is to me, the board did not love and respect me back. It did not understand what I saw, what I felt and what I created with my actors, creative teams and the audience.”
Though ENO audiences are yet to pass judgment, it’s clear her cast and creative team are having fun. It is the final week of rehearsals, and the script is still evolving. Music ricochets around the room and, in every break, she scurries back to her laptop to tap in dialogue changes in consultation with whichever performer has suggested them. “She’s created real characters for us mortals,” says Ed Lyon, whose Orpheus has been gifted with an unprecedented reprisal of an aria in the final act. “Partly,” says Rice, “to give him more to sing, but also to celebrate the love story.”
Her first decision, she says, was that Orpheus and Eurydice were going to love each other. For that, she had to create a context for their current disenchantment, so she introduced a dumbshow prologue suggesting a domestic tragedy. “By the end of the overture, they’re so sad that their marriage has broken down, but all the music is unchanged – and Eurydice still hates the violin.”
Rice has set the show in the 1950s, sidestepping Offenbach’s political satire – beyond “very gently referencing #MeToo” by emphasising the predatory nature of Jupiter, and modelling Public Opinion, the choric figure who militates for the reunion of the lovers, on a London cab driver. She has reordered scenes and enlisted her longstanding collaborator Tom Morris to rewrite the lyrics. “There are lots of puppet bees and balloon sheep, but I haven’t come in saying – how can I make it an Emma Rice opera?’ I feel humble. I was going to say I’m flying by the seat of my pants, but I should be diplomatic and say I’m watching with interest.”
At 52, Rice is an effervescent presence who looks like she’s just tumbled out of a theatre wardrobe, with her silver-blond hair whipped up like a slightly melting vanilla ice cream. She has arrived at ENO flushed with the success of Malory Towers, the second production of her new theatre company Wise Children – named after the Angela Carter novel it made its debut with. But she doesn’t make light of the trauma of her Globe bust-up, saying: “I’m OK now, but the upset probably took two years to get over. It’s like other griefs and losses: you gradually begin to realise, ‘I didn’t think of it today.’”
Does she see a new career opening up for her in opera? “I’m determined to see the whole process out, but I’m a theatre-maker. I’ve never done TV, film or opera before, I just see and think in theatre, so there’s no power grab going on. On the other hand, the Coliseum is double the size of the biggest theatre I’ve worked, which is thrilling because I’ve got a big old vision.” She sure has: for the Gallop Infernal, more than 50 Soho sleazebags will rise from tables in a shady underworld nightclub to dance the famous can-can number.
One novelty, for a director with a background in collaborative music theatre, will be the need to hand the production over in its final stages to conductor Sian Edwards because, in opera, the music always comes first. Rice is not sure how easy that will be: “I’m possibly more of a control freak than I think I am. My friends tease me, saying: ‘Do it any way you like – but not like that.’”
But it’s all part of an invigorating new chapter for Rice. “I’ve loved being in my 50s,” she says, “because it felt narratively perfect to say that, at this stage in my life, I have a clean slate and I’m going to do something with everything I’ve learned.” The key is to never look back.
• Orpheus in the Underworld is in rep at the London Coliseum, 5 October to 28 November.
