On Directing Opera
I put the music on stage.
Everything begins with the score. The music is not an accompaniment to the drama; it is the drama. A hesitation in the orchestra, an unresolved phrase, a sudden change of rhythm - these are dramatic events. They reveal what a character is thinking, resisting or concealing, sometimes in direct contradiction to what they are singing.
My job is to make that visible.
I am obsessed with people. With what they want, what they hide, how they manipulate each other, how they love each other, and how quickly love can turn into something else. I want to know exactly what is happening between two people at any given moment. Not approximately. Exactly. Why does she look away now? Why does he cross the room at this particular point in the music? What has changed between them in those four bars?
I don't like vague answers in the rehearsal room. Passion is not an action. Despair is not an action. I want to know what someone is doing to another person and why. Once we find that, the emotion takes care of itself.
And I love singers. I admire them and I love working with them. I enjoy challenging them, discovering what they can do as actors, sometimes surprising them with what they find in themselves. I have uncompromising artistic standards, but I believe just as strongly in the care and generosity with which we should pursue them. The people who bring a production to life are not instruments of my vision; they are essential collaborators. I want to create the conditions in which they feel trusted enough to take risks, to be vulnerable, to question and to give more than they thought possible. Empathy does not mean lowering expectations. Quite the opposite. I believe the most demanding work can emerge from an atmosphere of mutual respect, curiosity and trust. I arrive with a very clear vision, but I want the people in the room to make it richer, more complicated, more truthful.
This is why I prefer to revive my own productions. Because directing is not arranging bodies in space. A revival cannot simply be a reconstruction of what happened with another cast three years earlier. The relationships have to be rebuilt. The psychology has to be rediscovered. Otherwise, what exactly are we reviving?
I think on an operatic scale. I love the big numbers of people and I love the big stage. I love its possibilities, its demands, its sheer audacity. I want to create worlds that are bold, visually striking, sometimes unsettling, but always driven by the story. I have no interest in beautiful pictures for their own sake.
What excites me is making the smallest human detail resonate across an enormous space. A look between two people that changes the balance of an entire scene. A moment of stillness that becomes almost unbearable. An image that suddenly makes the music visible.
This is the particular craft of directing opera. One cannot simply enlarge naturalism and expect it to work. One needs to understand how theatrical gesture, space, rhythm and image carry meaning on an epic scale. I want psychological precision and theatrical audacity in the same breath and I refuse to sacrifice one for the other.
And I love the classics. I love entering these extraordinary works that have survived for centuries. And why should I take anything for granted? Why is this character behaving this way? Why have we always accepted this interpretation? What have we stopped noticing because we know the piece so well?
I am not interested in updating an opera simply to make it look contemporary. That seems to me rather superficial. I am interested in getting underneath it, challenging its assumptions, finding the uncomfortable truths that are already there.
Particularly when it comes to women.
Opera has given us some of the most extraordinary female characters ever written. Think about that. At a time when women were largely excluded from power and public life, opera placed them centre stage, both as celebrated performers and as formidable heroines. They drive the action, carry the emotional weight and make the impossible choices. Yet for most of opera's history, men have written their stories, defined their desires and decided their fates. I want to question the assumptions behind those stories: why a woman's ambition becomes dangerous, her sexuality a transgression, her independence a threat, and why so often she must be punished for exercising the very agency that makes her extraordinary.
I find this endlessly fascinating, and sometimes infuriating.
I want to know what happens when we look at these women from their own point of view. Not through the eyes of the men who desire them, abandon them, possess them or punish them. What is their version of events? What have we misunderstood about them? What have we never bothered to ask?
I don't want to turn them into heroines or victims. That would be another way of denying them their complexity. I want them to be difficult, contradictory, intelligent, cruel, funny, sexually alive, capable of making terrible mistakes. I want to give them the full range of human behaviour that we have always allowed men.
And I want to tell their stories with absolute clarity.
I am a storyteller. I don't think clarity is the enemy of sophistication. Quite the opposite. The more precise the storytelling, the further you can take an audience into ambiguity, contradiction and discomfort. I want the audience to know what is at stake, even when they don't know whom to believe.
I sometimes wonder why anyone would choose to make theatre without music. I mean it! What an extraordinary thing we have at our disposal. An orchestra that can expose a lie. A human voice that can make us understand something before our minds have caught up. A musical phrase that can transform the meaning of a gesture.
And that voice. The sheer physical force of a human being singing, without amplification, across a vast theatre. There is nothing quite like it. It is both enormously powerful and completely vulnerable.
I think we sometimes forget what a privilege it is to work in this art form.
Opera is not primarily an art of ideas for me. Of course ideas matter. Of course we have something to say about the world. But I don't want to spend an evening in the theatre admiring somebody's intellectual argument. I want to be moved. Profoundly moved.
And I don't think that is a modest ambition. Quite the contrary. It is much easier to make an audience understand an idea than to make them feel something they cannot quite explain.
I was six years old when I first went to the opera. I cannot tell you exactly what I understood that evening. But I remember what I felt. The sound of the orchestra, the voices, the whole extraordinary world unfolding in front of me. And the physical sensation, a shiver racing all the way up my spine.
And that is what I want to give an audience. Not simply an evening at the theatre, but an experience they will carry with them, as I have carried mine.
I still get that shiver. And I want the public to feel it too.
Rodula Gaitanou
London, October 2026.