EIF: Scottish Opera's Roxana Haines on a new production of Oedipus Rex at the National Museum of Scotland
Scottish Opera stage director Roxana Haines - and members of her choir - discuss the challenges and rewards of staging a Stravinsky opera in The National Museum of Scotland
In the 2006 fantasy movie Night at the Museum, an overnight security guard (played by Ben Stiller) is startled when, after dark, the exhibits burst into life. An unlikely adventure begins, and with the help of Attila the Hun, a dinosaur skeleton, characters from Ancient Rome, a horse-mounted Teddy Roosevelt and sundry others, he foils the attempted robbery of a precious artefact. A silent sanctuary revealing its fantastical alter ego.
Stage director Roxana Haines thought immediately of Shawn Levy’s hit movie when asked to stage Stravinsky’s grisly opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex in The National Museum of Scotland, a production for Scottish Opera, complete with 70-strong Community Choir, that runs over three nights (12,18 & 19 August) at the Edinburgh International Festival. As Stravinsky himself stated, his characters “should give the impression of living statues”.
If that all sounds a bit Greek drama-ish, that’s exactly where this 1920s neo-classical opera, based on Sophocles’ play to a libretto by the composer’s surrealist buddy John Cocteau, is coming from.
“I think Stravinsky gives us permission to treat the piece like an artefact,” argues Haines. “He speaks about it being in Latin - a stone language as he calls it - but there’s something really beautiful, really exciting about it existing in a state like the exhibits in a museum.”
That’s the balance she’s aiming at in her museum-based realisation of a work Stravinsky’s favourite impresario Diaghilev described as “un cadeau très macabre”. On the one hand there’s a cool detachment to this sordid hour-long tale of prophesies and misfortune, a ritualised aura that dryly depersonalises Sophocles’ tale of inconvenient prophesies and misfortune; while on the other, a narrator instills a human dimension, dressed in the vernacular, countering the sung Latin with - given that the 1927 premiere was in Paris - spoken French.
In this case, it’s Edinburgh vernacular. “Our speaker role is played by an actor dressed as a National Museum of Scotland cleaner,” Haines explains. “Just as [Larry] in Night at the Museum she watches the place come to life, inviting us in because she wants to share the chaos, the drama, the blood and the gore.”
With ample resources to meet the challenge and a flair for the surreal, Haines - who specialised in Greek drama as an undergraduate and is currently further expanding her professional horizons by completing a masters in drama therapy at Edinburgh’s Queen Margaret University - doesn’t shy from the odd liberty.
Besides the massive community choir, she has to hand a 25-strong professional chorus, a vibrant lead cast of ten (including mezzo-soprano Kitty Whately as Jocasta, tenor Shengzhi Ren as Oedipus, and the ever-reliable Roland Wood as Creon), an orchestra of 80, and a production crew of around 60, all under the musical direction of conductor Stuart Stratford.
“We’re taking some Cocteau-inspired liberties with the story, especially at the end, and we’ve even added some unscripted Gods,” she reveals, with the practical admission that “we couldn’t afford supernumerary deities so we gave the roles, eight of them, to friends and supporters of Scottish Opera and the EIF.”
Neither Scottish Opera nor Haines - who until recently was a staff director with the company - are strangers to staging opera in unconventional venues. Past successes include an ebullient 2018 fairground-themed Pagliacci in a Paisley circus tent and a sparkling 2022 Bernstein’s Candide in the company’s Glasgow Production Studio car park. “The joy of site-specific, promenade-immersive pieces like this is that every performance is different.”
Which is where the open-minded zeal of Scottish Opera’s Community Choir plays its strongest hand.
“They’re game for anything and I love their directness,” says Haines. “When something doesn’t go to plan, the professionals will just keep a straight face, but this community chorus will tell you ‘that was shit!’ Equally, they’ll tell you when it feels right. There’s no greater feeling than when we finish a scene and there’s all this positive energy.”
They come from all walks of life. Jim O’Neil, a retired Glasgow doctor whose previous singing experience had been as a member of the a cappella group Closeshave Chorus, answered the call along with two of his fellow choir members. “‘We’d never sung opera before,” he admits. “I’d sung classical music but nothing in Latin, but I am really enjoying the Oedipus Rex rehearsals. We’ve gone from Barbershop to Opera, Sinatra to Stravinsky!”
75-year-old Marion Flett, also from Glasgow and retired from a career in community-based adult education and early years education, turned to singing on the advice of her doctor following a chronic respiratory illness. “My participation in these productions has demonstrated the great value of being able to sing with others for enjoyment, and the contribution these opportunities make to health and well-being,” she believes.
Many have participated before, also in a stirring new version of Henry Bishop’s irreverent Burns-based cantata The Jolly Beggars. But for this Oedipus Rex, Edinburgh has also stepped up to the mark with a matching choral contingent. The two groups met for the first time only recently.
“To my surprise a whole quarter of the room said they worked with NHS Lothian,” Haines recalls of the occasion. “Which perfectly highlighted what is so special about this project, where everybody has done something completely different during the week - some in offices, some nursing - yet on a weekend have chosen to be here. What a beautiful way to start a rehearsal. I’ve tried not to take that for granted.”
The big unknown, says Haines, will be the audience itself. “When they enter the museum’s Grand Gallery, they’ll be encouraged to pick a side - left towards ‘James Watt’, or right towards ‘The Stag’, or maybe alongside the Gods in the balconies. We won’t know the full possibilities until we eventually get in there to rehearse. It’s so hard to predict how audience members will behave in such an immersive space, so it’s difficult to know how much we can promenade, how much they’ll be able to move with the action.”
Whatever transpires, prepare for a moving night at the museum.
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