Press Contact: Megan Stone
14 January 2025
Weaving together live performance, projection and recorded sound to create a more intimate, visceral telling of the Vaughan Williams opera, Riders to the Sea follows a family in an ancient fishing community haunted by the grief of losing nearly all of their male members at sea.
This one-act tragedy is coming to Theatre Royal Plymouth from 07 – 08 February, and this immersive show will mark the first time an opera has been shown in The Drum.
As matriarch Maurya and her daughters try to carry on with their lives, remaining son Bartley finds himself drawn back home, setting off a chain of seemingly inevitable events. Riders to the Sea sees OperaUpClose’s trademark reframing of a classic to explore universal themes of love, duty, grief, identity and humankind’s relationship with the natural world. A cast of opera singers and instrumentalists will have equal agency as storytellers, removing traditional barriers between pit, stage and audience in a similar vein to the company’s 2023 version of The Flying Dutchman, enabling intense and direct musical storytelling.
Originally written as a play by JM Synge, the opera by much loved composer Ralph Vaughan Williams was first performed in 1937. Composer and conductor Michael Betteridge has now reimagined the score into a new chamber orchestration for oboe, clarinet and accordion with Director Flora McIntosh bringing the narrative into the 21st Century as an exploration in reconciling traumatic memory. As part of their commitment to find new and creative ways to increase access to the art form and enhance the theatrical experience for all, Riders to the Sea will be the companies first production to integrate captions into the set design, using font, colour and animation to enhance text as a key part of the visual language and storytelling.
The production also features a specially commissioned choral Prologue The Last Bit of Moon, with a poetic libretto co-written by local Solent group of writers and poets ArtfulScribe’s Community Sirens Collective who are led by cross-disciplinary artist Antosh Wojzik. Set to music by Michael Betteridge, the chorus has been recorded by a network of male and low-voice community choirs from across the UK including the award-winning LGBTQ+ open access choir The Sunday Boys and will be central to a sound and visual language for the production that combines live performance with recorded sound and projections.
The show will kick off a five-week UK tour later this month, starting at MAST Mayflower Studios Southampton, and will visit Exeter, Plymouth, Chichester, London, Hull, Oxford and Blackpool, where The Sunday Boys will perform The Last Bit of the Moon live.
Flora McIntosh, Director & Artistic Director, OperaUpClose said: “It is an honour and a privilege to collaborate with so many exceptional creative voices on this project, my directorial debut with OperaUpClose. This approach has shone a bright light on the universality of the themes in Riders to the Sea and enabled a bold, new take on the narrative that speaks directly to the now.”
Michael Betteridge said: “OperaUpClose have been really ambitious and modern in their approach. They’re taking this work, originally scored for a huge orchestra and pairing it down to something so intimate.”
OperaUpClose is a national touring opera company with storytelling, partnership and innovation at its heart. Intimate in scale and mighty in impact. Since 2009 they have grown from their first, Olivier-Award winning, production in a 35-seat theatre above a pub; to the opera company with the widest geographical reach pre-pandemic; to the only full-time resident opera company in the South-West working with multi-artform collaborators from our home at the dynamic cultural hub MAST, Southampton.
OperaUpClose extend the appeal, relevance and reach of the artform with cross-disciplinary and co- creative commissions performed alongside bold, re-interpretations of established material. They engage the most exciting, emerging creative talent to distil the essence of classic operas into new, contemporary chamber works with their own artistic integrity and excellence, bringing the new and the established together in visceral, up close theatrical productions.
Running Time: 65 minutes (no interval) | Suitable for ages 12+