48 LISTENER MARCH 7 2020
by ELIZABETH KERRT
homas de Mallet Burgess has big
ambitions for NZ Opera, the com-
pany he joined 18 months ago
as general director. He wants to
“reimagine the art form and the
relationship between artist and audience”.
His upcoming production is a bold dem-
onstration of how he plans to “change the
narrative of opera” in New Zealand.
Eight Songs for a Mad King, composed by
Brit Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and pre-
miered in 1969, is far from the full-blown
extravagant productions most often
staged by opera companies worldwide. A
half-hour-long chamber opera, it is writ-
ten for solo baritone and six musicians, all
on stage. The music is not conventionally
tuneful, but this astonishing tour de force
has continued to capture audiences for
half a century with its brilliant intensity,
theatrical flair and huge range of powerful
emotions, expressed through the tragic
figure of a demented King George III.
Maxwell Davies was inspired by a min-
iature mechanical organ owned by George
III. The king, imprisoned for erratic
behaviour, tried to teach his bullfinches
to sing the eight songs in the music box,
singing to them, the composer explained,
“with his ravaged voice made inhuman by
day-long soliloquies”. The flute, clarinet,
violin and cello represent the birds and
the players sat in spotlit golden cages in
the 1969 production.
When New Zealand baritone Robert
Tucker discovered Eight Songs almost a
decade ago, he had completed opera stud-
ies at the Australian Opera Studio in Perth
and was working as a singer in London.
After a gig in an opera chorus, he andNerviness of
King George
NZ Opera’s Eight
Songs for a Mad King
sets the regent’s
mental distress
in a boardroom.
CH
AR
LE
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loyd Malcolm’s dialogue veers
between period and contemporary
vernacular as she addresses issues
that still exist, including domestic abuse,
institutionalised misogyny and the
thwarting of female ambition, in this case,
Emilia’s desire to be a writer, an equal to
Shakespeare in terms of skill and intellect.
In those days, a woman could not be pub-
lished unless releasing religious material.“Our Emilia has one foot back in those
times and one foot in our times,” says
Lloyd Malcolm, “and the language needed
to reflect that. Some of the music and
design reflects that as well. It also meant
we were being very clear with what we
were saying. A lot of our audience is
young; we felt we were accessible in a way
we needed to be. There was no mistaking
what we were trying to say. And yes,” she
adds with a laugh, “we definitely did have
men [in the audience] who didn’t like it.”T
he Globe’s commissioning of Emilia
by new artistic director Michelle
Terry was timely for Lloyd Malcolm.
After starting out more than a decade ago
as a writer-actor in theatre groups The
Apathists and Trippplicate, she abandoned
acting because of stage fright.
“It got to the stage when I was spend-
ing a lot of time panicking about theperforming and not thinking about the
writing, and I decided to focus on the
writing.”
Lloyd Malcolm went on to create
pantomime adaptations, which are huge
events in the London theatre scene. She
wrote acclaimed plays such as Belong-
ings and The Wasp, which is also being
adapted for the cinema. But she was
going through a fallow period before the
Emilia project took off, when she started
to find real affinity with her subject.
“I was at a stage when I was quite frus-
trated and not getting anything offered,
so when this came along, I could relate.
The struggles remain the same. They
may be less acute or more acute, but it’s
still the same kind of thing. We are still
living within the structure of the patriar-
chy, which is what they were. Emilia had
way more than me, but I can still relate.”
In the fine Globe tradition, Emilia is
rollicking entertainment, but it also car-
ries a deep vein of anger, culminating in
the final address by “Emilia3”, aged 76.
The audience response is always over-
whelming, says Lloyd Malcolm.
“At the Globe and the Vaudeville,
there was a lot of involving the
audience, and when she came to do
that speech, they were shouting out
and cheering and clapping,” she says.
“It would always create an amazing
reaction, really emotional, lots of
hugging and chatting – that was
unexpected for us. After the first couple
of shows at the Globe, we started to
realise we were saying stuff that was
important to us, but we also saw how
important it was to say it out loud on
the big stage.” lEmilia, Pop-up Globe, Auckland, March 4-22.Shakespeare was fixated
on the “Dark Lady”
mentioned in the final 27
of his 154 sonnets, andby Sonnet 147, his love
had become a “fever”.Emilia’s Auckland
cast. Three actors
share the title role.