A BAWDY bedroom scene is playing on Scottish Opera’s rehearsal stage. Baritone Peter Sidhom, playing Sir John Falstaff – in a padded fat suit that bulges bizarrely from both his front and rear – is comically attempting to pin soprano Amanda Roocroft on the bed.
Roocroft, playing Alice Ford, is the picture of false innocence. She dodges his lunges just in time before being squashed, giggling, on a giant basket, whose lid is threatening to collapse, singing all the while. In his absurd attempt at seduction, Falstaff has fallen into a trap.
As in any such production, the scale of the operation in Scottish Opera’s Eddington Street technical centre is impressive. There are not merely the half-dozen principal singers involved in the action. A dozen people behind a line of desks are watching and running this rehearsal for Verdi’s Falstaff. The team runs from a movement coach to an Italian coach to the piano accompanist as well as the conductor, Peter Robinson, standing beside the director, Dominic Hill.
Late in the production, close to the final rehearsals, Hill is finessing the timing of falls on to basket and bed, the way Falstaff’s legs stick up as he flails under his own weight. Hill’s work ranges from “door issues” – getting the wing door to open on cue – to the way Dame Quickly, played by Sally Burgess, waddles with a cushion when she’s lampooning Falstaff.
Even in this undressed rehearsal, Sidhom’s comic poise and timing as Falstaff are self-evidently superb. “So far it’s been quite easy because I wear the fat suit over a T-shirt,” he says. “By the time I get on stage I will have five to six layers on.”
His character is the elderly and overweight knight that Shakespeare first introduced in Henry IV Part 1, sent off to prison in Henry IV Part 2, and returned, allegedly on the orders of Queen Elizabeth, in the Merry Wives of Windsor. He is an absurd, aged, self-deluded, would-be Don Juan, who tilts at women like Don Quixote tilts at windmills.
Guiseppe Verdi was almost 80 when Falstaff was performed for the first time – at La Scala in Milan – in 1893. It was his 26th and last opera, written partly at the urging of the librettist, Arrigo Boito, who had worked on another Shakespearean opera, Othello.
“And what if I were not to hold up under the work?” the composer wrote to Boito. “And if I were not to finish the music? Then you would have wasted so much time and effort for nothing.”
Falstaff feels like an older man’s work; aside from the young lovers, Fenton (Federico Lepré) and Nannetta (Lucy Crowe), the characters are married, the women shrewd.
Verdi and Boito called their Falstaff “the big belly”. The librettist cherry-picked the Shakespearean scenes to construct a coherent and witty story, a comic gem firmly centred on Falstaff’s attempts to seduce two women, Alice Ford and Meg Page (Leah Marian Jones), which they use to ridicule and humiliate him.
The last opera of Verdi’s life, however, is known for much more than words. It is considered the composer’s greatest work, but also one which barely features the glorious arias characteristic of Verdi’s work in La Traviata or Rigoletto.
Falstaff, says Sidhom, is “extraordinarily different”. He suggests Verdi had picked up Wagner’s flowing style, cutting short the set-piece aria for a continuous piece of music. The first productions of Der Ring des Nibelungen appeared 20 years before Falstaff.
“He must have heard Wagner operas because he’s moved so far from his early and middle style,” said Sidhom. “This is composed in the Wagner style, the influence is certainly there. The Ring had happened.”
There’s an element of self-parody in the work, Sidhom suggets. Arias and melodies are flirted with, then dropped.
“He had so many melodies with him,” says Sidhom. “It was the last opera he was going to write, and he had a whole bag of melodies to write up. Things which in early days would have been a set-piece aria, they come and go in 30 seconds.
“There’s a little aria that comes and goes in a page in my attempted seduction of Alice. I tell her how I was young I was so slim, I could slip through the eye of a needle. It’s a gorgeous melody. It comes and goes on a page. It’s a glimpse and it’s gone.”
Falstaff is directed by Dominic Hill, named last year as the artistic director of the Traverse theatre in Edinburgh. In 2005, Hill directed Scottish Opera’s touring production of Verdi’s Macbeth, a small-scale version, with seven singers and piano. In the final act of Falstaff, he is directing about 40 people on stage.
The preparation for his first full-scale opera was “massive”, he says. “One of the major differences between directing an opera and directing a play is learning it, really learning it. It’s in a different language, the amount of work you do is huge. Thank God they give you 18 months’ notice.”
Early on, he found four DVDs and several recordings. “I was listening to it 20 million times and studying the libretto, making sure I understood everything. The challenge is making it funny, but not in a forced way,” he said. “It is like a play. People chat, there are no big arias, there’s action in real time in which people talk to each other.”
Falsfaff’s humiliation takes different forms: he’s thrown in the Thames, beaten in the park. He tangles with four fun-loving women who pool their wits and resources against the men. “The men are ridiculously obsessed and narrow-minded,” says Hill. “The women are smart and sassy and brilliant really. It’s one of the brilliant things about the piece that it really celebrates that.”
Then there’s the “viciousness” of the opera’s language, in which Boito deploys a stream of archaic, even invented Italian. In translation, the women sing: “Watch out, you polygamist / Disguised as a vat! / The fate of a bigamist, / A tri or tetragamist, / Is something to fear, / Above all when you’re fat!”
Hill, with his designer Tom Piper, a regular collaborator, decided to set the opera when it was written, in the late-19th century, rather than Shakespeare’s 15th-century plot. The designs are based on two celebrated caricaturists, Honoré Daumier, whose caricatures of French royalty landed him in jail, and George Cruikshank, the English caricaturist and illustrator for Charles Dickens.
He wanted to heighten the dark, some vicious undercurrent, and ludicrousness of the piece, Hill says.
“We went for this idea of 19th-century caricatures, a bit like those illustrations in Dickens – that larger than life cartoony kind of feel. There’s a slightly heightened, cartoony quality to the whole thing.”
The opera’s dark side comes in scenes when a disguised Ford sings his from an armchair, vowing revenge on Falstaff, while Falstaff is dressing himself to seduce Ford’s wife, leading to the famous baritone duet. “It keeps switching from being light and silly to incredibly powerful and dark and moving.”
But while Falstaff is fooled, vilified and abused, he remains an irrepressible character. His final fugue, which the entire cast then joins, more or less celebrate Shakespeare’s words that all the world’s a stage, and he an entertainment.
“At the end of the piece, after they’ve kind of beaten him up, and he’s come to some kind of realisation that he’s been made fool of, he turns round and goes, ‘You may be mocking me but I’m the person with the wit and the humour,’” says Hill. “He makes their lives, he put the salt into their food, he’s the one that has the life force, this joyfulness which, for all his faults, wins out.”
• Falstaff is at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow, 13, 15, 17, 21 and 24 May, then tours to His Majesty’s Theatre in Aberdeen, Eden Court in Inverness and Edinburgh Festival Theatre, in June. See
www.scottishopera.org.uk The full article contains 1379 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
