Cricket players, Cornish gangsters and a love affair played out against the backdrop of Kwik Save make an unlikely recipe for operatic ecstasy. But not so at the hands of musical maestro Chris Monks, whose re-workings of classic operas have been delighting New Vic audiences for years. Now revolutionising the witty and dark Don Giovanni, Monks is again teaming up with his favourite partner in crime – Mozart…
Chris Monks is a musical maverick. Since 1995, the writer/musician/director has been working on a popular revolution in opera and, whilst not quite guillotining heads at the D’Oyly Carte, Chris has nevertheless transformed the genre for thousands of ordinary theatregoers. By adapting classic pieces, Monks has successfully reinvented opera as an accessible form – without the hefty price tag.
“I suppose it is part crusade, part guilty pleasure” begins Chris on the healthy obsession that has seen him take on works from Gilbert & Sullivan to Mozart. “I love opera and would like more people to enjoy it, but it’s moved a long way from where it started.”
“If you go back to Mozart’s time, operas weren’t huge and ostentatious – they were very intimate with little in the way of spectacle. I’ve tried to take opera back to its roots, but to make it as accessible as it was then, you need to update it for a 21st century audience.”
Certainly, Monks’ transformational sleight-of-hand involves much more than simply relocating the original to a more contemporary setting. Keeping the rudiments of the story and its original score, he sets about ‘transposing’ the piece for a modern audience: writing a brand new libretto (in English), changing the setting and, importantly, abandoning the histrionics of ‘conventional’ opera in favour of a more natural acting style.
"I suppose it is part crusade. part guilty pleasure"
“Pavarotti had possibly the greatest voice of the last century but I could never believe him as an actor,” says Chris emphatically.“A huge, well-fed bloke playing a penniless student? It’s completely ridiculous.
“I employ actors who sing, not the other way around. They have to be able to construct a many-layered character and not just rely on the music. In my shows, you’ve got to believe in these people and what they are doing.”
Monks’ first foray into opera involved Gilbert and Sullivan on a cricket pitch, taking The Mikado from Japan to an English cricket club and, in doing so, perfectly re-capturing the original’s satire on the rituals of British life – “I was looking for a piece for drama students. I’d always thought Gilbert and Sullivan was a bit crusty, but I was persuaded by a friend to look at The Mikado. He was right…” Sure enough, Monks’ village green re-visioning caught the imagination of critics and audiences alike, and thirteen years after The Mikado’s first performance at the New Vic, the public’s appetite for these clever operatic offerings is still insatiable. After The Magic Flute and The Marriage of Figaro, Chris is taking on his third Mozart opera with the devilishly good Don Giovanni. So are there any more tricks left up his sleeve?
“There are lots of surprises but I can’t tell you about them otherwise there won’t be any! What I can tell you is that Don Giovanni was almost a dead end!” laughs Chris.
“I wanted to do Don Giovanni a few years ago, but I hadn’t found a way of making it accessible. I got on this tack about him being a vampire because he preys on women – but I hadn’t got it right. The thing about Don Giovanni is that women keep coming back and, of course, that can’t happen if they’re dead! So it didn’t hold up.
“But I had a moment where it all fell into place: I wanted to include aspects of the supernatural, a lot of magic and illusion, and suddenly I realised that Don Giovanni should be the sort of guy who sawed women in half for a living. A wonderful film called The Prestige really confirmed that I could use this world, and now I have Count Zhivarny, a bogus Hungarian stage illusionist, and his assistant Alfred, who does all the hard work.”
Unfortunately, there is no assistant to provide the smoke and mirrors for Chris who is doing most of the hard work himself: pouring over the libretto as writer and musician, as well as dealing with the thousand concerns of a director. It is a powerful vision that fuels the work of this operatic auteur, hell bent on bringing Mozart to the masses, and unsurprisingly, Monks is passionate when it comes to defending it.
“People can be extremely sniffy about the idea of my adaptations, but once they have seen them, they tend to love them. Part of the problem is that often the industry is not prepared to experiment. There are musicals in the West End that are engineered in a cynical way just to make money – some shows are no different today from the day they opened years before. I don’t want anything to do with that.
“Then there are other people, like Steven Sondheim, taking musical theatre seriously and making new things. If you go back to Leonard Bernstein and even Rodgers and Hammerstein, these are people who are trying to do something new. But then it becomes embedded and people don’t want to take chances there either. I’d love to do Oklahoma but they’re worried that I will mess about with it. They say “Of course, you are having a 25 piece orchestra”; and I say “Well no, I’m actually going to do it on a washboard and paper and comb” and immediately it’s a big NO! For me, when people are not prepared to experiment, it’s the death of theatre.”
“I want to bring theatre alive for audiences. I remember sitting in the auditorium at the New Vic when I re-worked The Marriage of Figaro. I was watching people enjoying this fantastic piece by Mozart and it felt like I’d passed on a great film. That gives me a great sense of worth, that I’m not just messing about. As far as I’m concerned, if people come and see Don Giovanni and think “Wow! This is fantastic, let’s go and see some more opera”, I’m a happy man.”
Certainly, a theatrical demise is hard to imagine at the hands of Chris Monks – unless the script calls for one. And, of course, it is tempting to guess what Mozart himself would make of Monks and the New Vic, this hotbed of the operatically unexpected… Chances are, he’d be loving every minute.
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