Music Theatre Wales

The Knot Garden at Music Theatre Wales

The Royal Opera House and Music Theatre Wales will co-produce a new production of Michael Tippett’s powerful and provocative chamber opera The Knot Garden.  The co-production – a first in Music Theatre Wales’ relationship with the Royal Opera House - opens at the Linbury Studio Theatre on April 30 2005, will be designed by the acclaimed video artists Jane and Louise Wilson.  The cast includes Helen Field as Denise, Jeremy Huw Williams as Mangus and Rodney Clarke as Mel. The director is Michael

The production, which will tour England and Wales  from May to July, forms part of the celebrations marking the centenary of Michael Tippett’s birth.

The involvement of two of the most highly regarded video artists working in Britain today is a radical departure for Music Theatre Wales and the Royal Opera House. Jane and Louise Wilson, who were nominated for the Turner Prize in 1999, are known for their compelling exploration of space and the power of the unconscious mind, creating a body of work which probes collective anxieties and phobias. It was these very qualities which convinced the opera’s irector, Michael McCarthy that they were the ideal creative partners.

Together with The Royal Opera’s production of The Midsummer Marriage in the autumn of 2005, this co-production will be a major feature of the Tippett centenary year at the Royal Opera House, bringing The Knot Garden, originally commissioned for the main stage in 1970, back to Covent Garden.

The Knot Garden was later re-orchestrated for a chamber orchestra of 22 players, helping to intensify the focus on the emotional and psychological world of the small cast.   In this form it is Tippett’s only chamber opera.

Taking The Tempest and Così fan tutte as its reference points, The Knot Garden explores the emotional and psychological world of seven characters as they grapple with their deepest doubts and desires.  Under the direction of the Prospero-like psychiatrist Mangus, each character is forced, during the course of the opera, to discover more about themselves through their relationships with others.  This is an opera which speaks clearly to contemporary audiences, and is also as a fable for modern times, placing the individual in a wider, social context.

The opera’s intimate and highly concentrated dramaturgy shows the composer at his most original, using the techniques of television, cinema and the twentieth-century popular musical to explore the tempestuous inner life and racing imagination of each character.  It is a powerful and provocative work - a fast moving emotional drama with some of Tippett’s most striking and beautiful writing for solo voice and ensemble, with soaring lyricism and vibrant, virtuosic display.  

Jane and Louise Wilson’s involvement in The Knot Garden is a bold first step  in a new programme of commissions to visual artists which ROH2  has initiated. Each commission will encourage a creative symbiosis between the visual and performing arts by combining the talents of composers, singers, choreographers, dancers and musicians with some of the most innovative visual artists working today.  This new series within the ROH2 programme aims to explore the potential of cross- fertilisation between performers more typically associated with the Royal

Music Theatre Wales is an Associate Company of the Royal Opera House where it has already co-revived Gwyneth and the Green Knight by Cardiff composer Lynne Plowman and co-commissioned Nigel Osborne’s opera The Piano Tuner.  The co-production of The Knot Garden will be the first new production created through this partnership and will be a flagship production for both companies, launched as part of the ROH2 programme at the Royal Opera House in the Linbury Studio Theatre, and then touring in England and Wales.

The Royal Opera House’s long association with Sir Michael Tippett has included the premieres of The Midsummer Marriage, King Priam and The Ice Break as well as The Knot Garden.