Bradford Opera Festival stage The Barber of Seville…but with a distinctive local twist

The opening event of the newly created Bradford Opera Festival is the world premiere of a Yorkshire dialect version of The Barber of Seville.

To make this happen the festival team have been working with legendary Yorkshire poet Ian McMillan and conductor Ben Crick, who has long had a dream to stage a version of Rossini’s classic tale of class, lust and betrayal performed in the local vernacular.

Alex Chisholm who has been a stalwart of the Bradford artistic scene for many years is directing, and she told our Features Editor Paul Clarke why this festival will help democratise a misunderstood art form for local audiences.

Of all the great operas, why did you choose The Barber of Seville?

This really came from Ben, and he has had this dream for the last 20 years, so it’s not just to do the Barber of Seville, but it is to do the three Figaro operas. So, Figaro operas are based on three Beaumarchais plays – The Barber of Seville, The Marriage of Figaro and The Guilty Mother.  The first two were written just before the French Revolution, and the third one after that, so as well as being really funny plays they are about class, sex, love and upheaval.  They were very shocking at the time, and there’s a very famous Barber of Seville, and there’s probably even more famous Marriage of Figaro from Mozart, but there’s never been a successful version of Guilty Mother.

So, the idea is The Barber of Seville this year and then the other two in subsequent years.

Ben has had this idea to do the first two Figaro’s, and then commission a new version of Guilty Mother, and actually have them as a trilogy in the way that’s never been done before. When he was talking to me about it, I absolutely get how that’s a really exciting idea that hasn’t been done before, so that you could actually through those three pieces chart the progression of these characters.

Why do you think this opera will resonate in a former West Yorkshire milltown?

We’re making it for Bradford because Bradford has always been the home of many types of revolution, even though we’re not setting it at the time of the French Revolution. What we’re actually doing is setting it so Barber of Seville happens in the late 60s, Marriage of Figaro happens in the early 70s and then Guilty Mother in the early 90s, so you do have the whole social, sexual revolution that happens over that period of time.

And as well as the local dialect there’s another twist in this production?

The twist is that it’s set in Bradford, Ian has put it into Yorkshire dialect, and we’ve changed the references to Seville to Bradford. Our Figaro, our barber, the actor is actually from India so his journey, we think, is that he left India went to Seville and now has ended up in Bradford. Part of the way that we’re doing it is that we very much wanted that the cast reflected some of the diversity of Bradford, so Figaro is originally from India, our Rosina is mixed race, our Bertha in Ukrainian and our Doctor Bartolo is Armenian. Bradford is a place where people have come, have always come, have found safety, have found sanctuary, have found a place where they can succeed.

The festival’s biggest problem might be that many people, rightly or wrongly, think that opera just isn’t for them, so how do you counter that often misplaced prejudice?

We want people to come and give it a go, they may discover that they enjoy it more than they think they do. This partly stems from when we did Ice Cream – The Opera on City Park as part of the Bradford festival of 2017, people stopped and loved it. We had crowds straining to see what was going on. Obviously, part of the reason they stopped in the first place was two ice cream vans, but they then stayed and listened.

So, you’re hoping people who might have seen that production, or maybe anyone that fancies trying opera for the first time, will come along?

If you’d said to those people, come and watch an opera, they probably wouldn’t have come and watched an opera. But if they hear some amazing music, and then they stop and they see something happening that’s really quite dramatic, then that thing draws them in. They wouldn’t necessarily even have got the name for that thing, but it was interesting. One thing we’re taking it out of Italian, so there isn’t hopefully that language barrier.

Tickets for the Barber of Seville are available from the Bradford Theatre Box Office on 01302 432000 or online www.bradford-theatres.co.uk