If you want something done, so they say, ask a busy mother. This advice may well hold true, but if the mother in question is Sophie Hunter, wife of Benedict Cumberbatch, then it is best not to refer to her new maternal status.
Although fans gathered on Valentine’s Day to catch a glimpse of her Isle of Wight wedding to the star of Sherlock, and paparazzi have swooped this month for shots of the couple’s first outings since the birth of their son, for Hunter, 37, it is definitely business as usual. And that business is avant-garde opera, and not being the other half of one of the most popular actors of the age.
“At the moment my focus is on opera and classical music,” said Hunter this weekend. The director and former performer is about to stage a unique immersive production of Benjamin Britten’s baroque-style cantata Phaedra, based on a translation of Racine’s tragedy and set near a deserted castle in Northern Ireland as part of Happy Days, the Samuel Beckett festival in Enniskillen.
The time around the birth of her first baby has been filled, she said, with work: “It has been a combination of music rehearsals in London and hard graft building in Enniskillen prior to the performance. It’s a very technical piece and it’s on a large scale, so the entire creative team are setting up camp in an equestrian arena to build it.”
At the end of the month her audience will travel down winding paths to the arena in the grounds of Necarne castle to hear mezzo-soprano Ruby Philogene sing with the Ulster Orchestra, accompanied by film and light projections.
The director, who brought out an album of French-language songs in 2005 as well as acting in television shows such as Midsomer Murders and Torchwood, comes from a well-heeled English background. Her grandfather was General Sir Michael James Gow, Aide-de-Camp General to the Queen in the early 80s, and her maternal great-great-grandfather was the first world war politician JEB Seely, Baron Mottistone. Born in London, she studied at Oxford University after attending the prestigious St Paul’s girls school.
But perhaps a family taste for adventure is evident in her father’s decision to swap a career in insurance for the life of a professional card player, teaching bridge at London’s Groucho Club, among other venues. Her own appetite for the wilder shores of art is now also clear. After training under mime artist Jacques Lecoq in Paris, she had a long relationship with the experimental sculptor Conrad Shawcross.
Later this year she is to mount an equally adventurous production of another Britten work, The Turn of the Screw, working again with Staples at Snape Maltings for Aldeburgh Music.
“This time we are working with Aurora Orchestra,” she said, “but it’s another case of bringing a team of collaborators together from film, fine art, theatre and opera. We are writing the experience out there so we are heading out for a research residency at Snape. Until then it’s model boxes, meetings, poring over the music and the text and getting increasingly excited at the prospect of another Britten adventure.”
Her interest in avant-garde entertainment dates back to her modern languages degree. “Going on to train with Lecoq in Paris meant I discovered European theatre at a formative moment growing up. Seeing the work of directors like Romeo Castellucci, Ivo van Hove, Thomas Ostermeier, and Simon McBurney and Théâtre de Complicité, was, and continues to be, hugely important to me. To my mind these are artists who are forging new languages of performance and storytelling, and their constant reinvention is very inspiring.”
Her own recent work in New York “in the context of a truly experimental and independent ‘downtown’ theatre scene” confirmed her path, she said. “New York was incredibly fulfilling and exciting.”
Hunter sees no real distinction between her niche work in opera and the kind of commercial success that her husband enjoys in films such as The Imitation Game or in next month’s production of Hamlet at the Barbican, for which all but “on the day” tickets sold out quickly.
“My job now is to make work, to tell stories,” Hunter said. But the director is not complacent about working in an area which usually escapes public attention. It is her mission to broaden both the world of opera and the public perception of it.
“There is still a critical need for a new audience and for new ways of thinking about the presentation and accessibility of opera and the concerts. The work I am making with [music director] Andrew Staples aims to shake up the status quo a bit. Taking the work out of the opera house and the concert hall is just the beginning.”
Hunter’s directorial debut in 2007 was at the Barbican Pit where she co-directed the avant-garde play The Terrific Electric. Since then she has directed a revival of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts and created a piece of performance art titled Lucretia and based on Benjamin Britten’s opera The Rape of Lucretia. Her production of the experimental play 69° South, also known as Shackleton Project, premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and toured north America.
She and Cumberbatch met acting together on the set of Susan Luciani’s 2009 thriller Burlesque Fairytales, set in a 1930s theatre.
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This article was amended on 15 July 2015 to amend the date of the wedding of Sophie Hunter and Benedict Cumberbatch.
