Mark Ravenhill isn’t afraid to shock. His entrée into Britain’s theatre world, Shopping and Fucking, was more like a detonation, with its frank depiction of drugs, prostitution, and sexual violence. Since then, he has gleefully skewered the excesses of consumerism and heteronormativity with plays like Handbag and Mother Clap’s Molly House, and more recently The Boy in the Dress in collaboration with Robbie Williams.
But as Ravenhill tells me, he very nearly ended up in the opera world instead. “When I was 19, I got a job working front-of-house at the English National Opera. People used to leave their programmes under their seats, and one of the things we had to do was going around and collect any trash at the end. I would take the programmes home and read the essays, the singers’ biographies, and I just got really into it!”
His time at ENO would also lead to his first proper directing jobs. “Someone who was working there asked me to be an assistant director for a Trovatore he was doing at Holland Park, and that led to me directing a revival of a touring production of Bohème and then my own production of Rigoletto. I got immersed quite quickly into this world, and found it very exciting. Having come from the world of studio theatre, opera offered these big worlds and big performances. My life seemed to be heading off in that direction – and then my first play got produced and suddenly things went off in a totally different direction.”
That play, 1996’s Shopping and Fucking, is seen as one of the defining works of 1990s British theatre – a confrontational, brash sensibility retrospectively termed ‘in-yer-face theatre’. There are parallels with the verismo movement of the 19th century, a point Ravenhill recalls. “I wrote the first draft of Shopping and Fucking around the same time I directed Bohème. I didn’t make any connections at the time, but some of the themes and motifs pop up in the play. I guess whatever’s been floating around is going to pop up in your work!”
He would return to Bohème in 2022, directing a new adaptation as part of his directorship of the King’s Head Theatre. A decade prior, he had revamped the libretto for Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea in the same space – a colloquial, contemporary rendering of the text that I will always remember for his rendering of Arnalta’s line ‘Fuck Poppea, fuck Rome, and fuck this fucking army!’ “I really wanted to do Poppea,” he tells me, “because it prefigures grand opera, and I think stripping it right back probably honours it as much as scaling it up to play in today’s big opera houses.” The opera was scaled down in cast and length, concentrating on the central characters. “I produced my own version of the libretto through sweat – writing a new English libretto to fit the score was like doing a very difficult, very long crossword puzzle.”
Did that give him the motivation to immerse himself more in the opera world? “It’s really, really great just being surrounded by music all day. Just being there in rehearsals, it’s like being massaged all day long by sound. It must have a physical effect on your body! I can’t really read a score, but I did teach myself to follow a score for when I was directing. So gradually, over the past 10, 15 years I’ve tried to introduce a bit of opera back into my life.”
This year sees Ravenhill’s most ambitious operatic project yet: a new production of Strauss’ Salome for Regents Opera. “Ben Woodward, the artistic director, loves the big German rep and he was looking for something that could follow their Ring cycle. And Salome is of course in that tradition, but it some ways it’s the opposite in that it’s so condensed: it has the propulsion of Greek tragedy. When he came to me with the idea it seemed like the right combination of scary and manageable. It’s big, epic, and challenging, and yet I felt like I could handle 90 minutes. It has this great dramatic momentum, so I figured I couldn’t mess it up too much!”
Given Ravenhill’s penchant for sex and violence, did Salome seem an obvious choice? “You know, when I said I was going to do Salome a couple of people told me that this was the perfect opera for me because it’s the closest to those 90s plays. And then in some ways I was a bit disappointed, because then I was wondering whether I was typecasting myself! But I think that those plays did have quite a big impact on young European directors – people like Thomas Ostermeier and Calixto Bieito found aesthetic questions and challenges in my plays and Sarah Kane’s plays. So in an odd way, maybe in a way that doesn’t happen very often, a bunch of new plays really impacted directors who took that into opera. And then in the noughties you had quite a lot of oral sex and junkies being chucked at Verdi!”
The other Salome connection comes through Oscar Wilde, with whom Ravenhill has had a long history. His 1998 play Handbag was based on Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, exploring the legacies of parenting and child neglect by juxtaposing Victorian nannies with 90s sperm banks. “I think one of the things that’s fascinating about Oscar Wilde is how different his work is. My first exposure was through his fairy tales, and then you have these society plays and essays and De Profundis. And then there’s the persona of Oscar Wilde himself, which is like a work of art in itself, the aesthete. And then there’s Salome, which almost feels like the least Oscar Wilde thing he ever wrote.”
Strauss worked from Hedwig Lachmann’s German translation of Wilde’s play, paring the text down by nearly half. As a playwright, how does Ravenhill approach the text? “When you read the play, you think how is this ever going to work? It actually plays better than it reads. But even so, it’s very, very stuffed with language. So I think it really lends itself to being cut back a bit, yet having the space for these big words and over-ripe language. I think the music gives it that space to explore that decadence, that over-ripe ornate feel.”
Salome is one of the most endlessly fascinating characters in opera, portrayed as anything from an abused victim to a monstrous femme fatale. How does Ravenhill conceive the role? “I’m surprised when I hear people describe her as being mad, or dangerous. There’s still a lot of that today in how people talk about the character – it’s weird to me to still read her in that way. But she’s kind of like a female Hamlet: she’s part of this new family, she has a displaced parent. And she’s supposed to be incredibly young – and she’s objectified and sexualized. I think trying to figure out who you are in that context is very off-centering. You see how that anger and confusion is displaced onto Jochanaan,” ie. John the Baptist. “Female anger is still very taboo. Being a victim can make you behave in ways that are cruel and irrational.”
And what of the infamous dance? “Pretty much my first thought when I was offered the job was the knowledge that, in some ways, every production of Salome is going to live or die by that dance. Because even if somebody doesn’t know anything about the opera they probably know that she does this dance. Luckily, I’d been working with Aletta Collins, who is a really great choreographer that trained at the Rambert and has done things everywhere from the Royal Ballet to musicals and plays.” Being able to collaborate with Collins is a huge weight off his shoulders, Ravenhill says. “That dance has got to be the climax dramatically and psychologically and theatrically, and I’m excited to work with one of the best choreographers out there for that. So I’ve lucked out there!”
Salome will be performed at York Hall, the Bethnal Green boxing venue where Regents Opera presented their Ring cycle. “Doing opera in the round invites you and the audience to create a different language. I love the fact that it brings the acting and the spatial relationship between the characters to the forefront. And with the history of York Hall, the performances are interspersed with boxing nights, when people are just going to be beating the crap out of each other and bleeding and stuff. That has a sort of resonance with the opera.”
The opening nights (the opera is double-cast) are being marketed as an ‘immersive dining experience’ – what can Ravenhill tell us about that? “It’s going to be quite a weird experience,” he laughs. “The ground floor seats will be tables with food, like in a cabaret. And Salome does start with a feast, and the audience will be a part of that. But then they’ve also got to witness all the violence and decapitation and stuff. If they come away from it thinking ‘oh, I really regret having eaten once it got really nasty – I couldn’t keep it down!’ I’ll know I’ve succeeded!”
Mark Ravenhill’s Salome is presented by Regents Opera from 10th–23rd April at York Hall, London.
This article was sponsored by Regents Opera.
