Making Waves

Jamie Dunn chats to Missy Mazzoli and Tom Morris about turning an early Lars von Trier film into an opera

To Scottish Opera, where American composer Missy Mazzoli is overseeing rehearsals for Breaking the Waves, her operatic take on Lars von Trier’s 1996 film of the same name, before its European premiere at the International Festival. “I don’t think I’ll be seeing that one,” says the receptionist, a self-confessed opera-nut, when I mention the title. “Too bleak.” Bugs Bunny’s fourthwall-breaking final line from Chuck Jones’ What’s Opera, Doc? springs to mind – “Well what did you expect in an opera... a happy ending?” But of course,

I know exactly what she means. Even Wagner would find Breaking the Waves outré.

The film follows Emily Watson’s Bess, a naïve new bride from an ascetic Scottish village dominated by Calvinist doctrine, who believes she communes directly with God. When she prays for her rakish oil rig-worker husband Jan to return to her, he does so on a stretcher after an accident on the rigs. Bess finds herself making a perverse pact with her infirm husband, who persuades her to sleep with random men and report back on her encounters. Bess is convinced these promiscuous acts will somehow revive his health.

Mazzoli first saw von Trier’s emotionally bruising film around a decade ago. “I felt the way a lot of people do when they see it: I was overwhelmed and I was shocked. It stayed with me for a really long time, but not necessarily in a good way. I didn’t think, ‘Oh I have to make this into an opera’.” She was talked into the project by Royce Vavrek, the Brooklynbased librettist with whom Mazzoli regularly collaborates. “Royce has loved the film since he was 14,” she reveals. “Which is weird, right?”

Despite Vavrek’s ardour for the material, Mazzoli took some convincing, mostly because of her appreciation for Breaking the Waves as cinema.

“I thought, ‘What are we doing turning it into an opera?’ ‘What can we bring to it?’” She soon realised the answer was plenty. “We ended up making something that is very different. I was able to bring a lot to the story that’s not in the film at all.”

Such as? “Well there’s no score in the film,” she offers, “nothing telling you how to feel except for what you’re seeing. So there’s a lot of space for me to add another layer. I had to come up with my own version of what is going on in Bess’s mind and how does it relate to my own experience as a young woman growing up.”

Bristol Old Vic’s Artistic Director Tom Morris, who’s directing this new version of the opera, joins our chat and suggests the main difference between the film and the opera is Mazzoli’s attitude to Bess’s fate. “Mercy sits in a very strange place in [von Trier’s] brain, you sense,” says Morris, “and the film articulates that. But my view is that mercy sits in a very different place in Missy’s brain. So the attraction of this project, for me, is the way in which Missy has taken that central character and written her this musical imagination.”

This production is something of a homecoming. Breaking the Waves was written in 2016 for Opera Philadelphia, but solidified in Mazzoli’s mind during a trip to Skye in 2014. “Skye’s landscape, which has these extremes that you never see in America, is definitely in the music,” she explains. “There are these lush meadows that are filled with jutting rocks that seem to come out of nowhere and fields full of sheep that end in a plunge off a cliff into the ocean. And all around these violent waves are crashing into this pristine, idyllic place. That was very shocking and inspiring to me, the violence and the lushness all at once.”

As Mazzoli mentioned, there’s no score in Von Trier’s film, but there is music. Its seven chapters are delineated by extended shots of ethereal landscapes, over which period pop songs blast out. Can we expect some ‘70s pop in her operatic production? Mazzoli smiles. “Put it this way,” she says, “there’s an electric guitar in the pit.”

“‘Cause you’re a ‘70s rock fan, aren’t you?” Morris teases.

“Yes, massive,” she laughs. “Elton John, David Bowie, Freddie Mercury – they are my spirit guides.”

Isn’t that a bit unusual for an opera composer? “Is it?” counters Mazzoli. “To me, it makes total sense. I mean, those men are operatic!”

SHOW: Breaking the Waves

VENUE: King’s Theatre

TIME: 7:15pm – 9:45pm, 21, 23, 24 Aug

TICKETS: £15

Art gives us access we wouldn’t otherwise have. When an Irish prisoner recalls his first experience of prison in The Examination (four stars), his entire expectations were based on TV. He waited to be shaved, hosed down and strip-searched. Art affects the world that we see.

The brilliant Brokentalkers go gunning for that in this slippery and self-aware interrogation of criminal justice. As well as a striking exposé of Ireland’s antiquated penal system, homing in on the inhumane (and illegal) practice of “slopping out” still not phased out, The Examination puts our prejudices and presumptions to the test. It demands an act of self-examination.

After a plea from a prisoner to be seen “not as animals in cages but as human beings,” the lights come up on a burly figure in a gorilla costume. Wille White, an actor with experience of penal institutions, is grilled by Brokentalker’s Gary Keegan about his time inside. With a silk hankie peeking out of his suit, Keegan lectures us on the Victorian “theory of the born criminal”, that credited criminality to genetics. His views seem underscored by his own experience of violent assault. It’s an uncomfortable dynamic: an interrogation of its own.

But neither actor’s all they seem to be. When White talks us through his unseen tattoos—a gremlin, a Smurf, George Benard Shaw—it’s not clear whether we ought to trust him. Keegan’s outward civility mightn’t mask the viciousness of the views he espouses, but it does soften their edges enough that we listen in. Again and again, The Examination pulls the rug out from under you. Its point is that people can change—for good and for bad—and art can play a part in that process. It can also, just as easily, prevent meaningful change, entrenching prejudices rather than breaking them down. The distinction is whether we’ll see (and judge) others as they are, not as they once were.

Slopping out might seem worse than solitary confinement. It’s not. Across America, some 80,000 inmates are held in single cells with minimal

The End

human contact for more than 22 hours a day. New York’s Dutch Kills Theatre show it up as a slow form of torture in Solitary (three stars).

Unfolding the constrained brain-drain of confinement through mime, Duane Cooper rolls off his bed, curls through his ablutions and tries to kill time. Press ups and jumping jacks. A bit of his book. Masturbation. Mostly, he waits for the next meal to clang through his cell’s metal hatch. Rinse hands and repeat. No wonder he tries to get a rise out of the roster of guards.

It’s a grinding watch, or it would be were Blake Habermann’s direction able to resist the itch towards incident. How to keep interminable boredom interesting? The more things and events Cooper finds to mime, the less truthful Solitary starts to seem.

It’s stronger when it takes flight. Using ropes to demarcate the cell, Habermann lets us into the prisoner’s head: the walls splice open, the room starts to spin, entangling Cooper in a cat’s cradle. Flashbacks and hallucinations swim through his cell. With Cooper’s focused intent at its centre, Solitary shows that isolation and imprisonment leave binds that will never be fully undone.

People need people, simple as that. Bertrand Lesca and Nasi Voutsas have spent the last few years fighting onstage, first in their debut show Eurohouse, then in Palmyra. The End (four stars) calls it quits. It’s a hymn to friendship – their friendship, male friendship.

It starts by sprinting ahead. A clumsy slideshow plays in silence, projecting the planet’s distant future. In a thousand years time, it says, buildings and bridges will fall. In eight thousand, human civilisation with be gone. In 20, the earth will tilt on its axis. It will fall out of orbit and, over millennia, will slowly be consumed by the sun.

The End dances in the face of that galactic death. It lives for the day and, in a downbeat, downright apocalyptic Fringe, it offers something like hope –a reason to live. All Lesca and Voutsas—Bert and Nasi—do is dance together. Neither’s a natural, not even close, but still they dash around like gawky gazelle, leap like river salmon and attempt lifts like they were Bolshoi leads. It’s clumsy, cack-handed and utterly endearing. Nothing more (nothing less) than two people at play.

And these two turn play into an art-form. They spin games out of nothing – rolling around, spinning circles, balancing on chairs. One alights on a possibility. The other joins in. Two little boys. Here and now.

Until, that is, they’re not. The End knows nothing lasts. People change; things fall apart. As it prises open that present moment—so fragile, so precious—and begins to admit the future once more, The End imagines that friendship falling apart, tilting on its axis as two people slip out of each other’s orbit. It’s an exhortation to take pleasure in people and to live for the day, and it’s as melancholic a thing as you’ll see all festival. Fin.