It’s not an entirely new concept, to put the backstage business of a theatre on the stage, and to turn the making of a show into the very subject of a show. In theatre, it’s a trope as familiar as Michael Frayn’s Noises Off or the current West End show, The Play That Goes Wrong. But in the opera house, it doesn’t often happen that the art-that-realises-art of the stage-managers and the technicians is put front and centre for an audience. (Even if they don’t turn the backstage crew into front-of curtain stars, recent live-streams and cinema broadcasts from the Royal Opera House, the Metropolitan Opera and English National Opera have shone an illuminating spotlight on just how crucial their work is for opera ever to actually happen.)
But Polly Graham’s new small-scale show for Welsh National Opera, where she’s the Genesis Assistant Director, goes a stage further than simply making a new piece of music-theatre about the process of making an opera. Unheard Voices - CREW, which will be put on in one of the rehearsal rooms of the Wales Millennium Centre, appropriately turning a backstage auditorium into a performance space tonight and tomorrow (12 and 13 December), puts four members of WNO’s stage crew on stage, sharing their stories about their lives in the opera house with an audience, turning these stagehands into performers for the first time in their lives. The show will also feature cameos from WNO’s Chief Executive and Artistic Director, David Pountney, one of their rehearsal pianists, David Doidge, and singer Aidan Smith, more used to being the audience-facing beneficiary of the stage crew’s ministrations than their equal on the stage.
As Polly Graham says, “adding David Pountney into the mix has been interesting, because opera is, inherently, a very structured, hierarchical business. Setting everyone in the room on an equal footing as performers has allowed us to overcome some of those hierarchies”. Pountney himself adds “it’s great to meet the ‘invisible people’, the people who keep the show on the road, and find out who they are for once, and give them a voice.” It remains to be seen how Graham will knit together the testimony of the stagehands, their tales of how they create mythical worlds of gods, monsters, as well as social-conscious verismo and critical contemporary commentary that productions like Pountney’s demand of them, as well as musical excerpts and the relationships among her cast of novice actors. If you’re in the Cardiff vicinity find out by going along to the show, and seeing for yourself the real lives of the backstage workers who nightly fashion the operatic illusions that the art-form requires, and listen to the Unheard Voices who make your operatic dreams come true.
