The Telegraph, 27 May 2017
By Hannah Furness
 
 
Cinema will save opera for a new generation, Royal Opera House director suggests
 
Streaming opera in the cinema could save it for a new generation, a Royal Opera House director has suggested, as he claims it is helping to weed out the "hammy" over-acting young audiences hate.

Keith Warner, who is to direct Otello in Covent Garden next month, said the exaggerated stage acting of years gone by can no longer make the cut, particularly once filmed and broadcast in close up on the big screen.

The development, he suggested, may have encouraged stars and directors to consider a more nuanced performance, which in turn has improved the stage experience for audiences.

Warner's production of Otello, starring Jonas Kaufmann and conducted by Sir Antonio Pappano, will be broadcast into cinemas on June 28.

Saying a new focus on how to project emotions to the back of the auditorium subtly was working well, he added it had helped discourage the hammed-up style favoured by acting greats of the past.

The new style, he argued, was preferable to new younger audiences of the kind desperately needed by opera houses if they are to survive.

"I wonder sometimes whether the cinema thing has played into that in the last ten years, in a totally good way," he said.

"If we're talking all the time about how we're going to bring new people in, they really don't want to see the old ham stuff. It begins to just put people off.

"Whereas the thing we've been working on today, it will work on the screen as well as in the auditorium and it's to do with some kind of inner power."

Asked at a press conference about Otello whether the live broadcast would change the way he directed, Warner said most of the details were left up to those responsible for the technical side of filming.

"There is something to do with the acting method that is a conundrum maybe," he added.

"Which is, the great film actors, as we know, are people that do nothing and show everything. You think of Robert de Niro, Spencer Tracy...these people who can just do it. It's very very hard.

"I was an enormous fan of Olivier who was so expansive on stage. And then when you see him on film it can be very eggy.

"There are a couple of brilliant performances, but the film version of Othello from the National Theatre is a source of constant embarrassment for everybody.

"But in the theatre it was never anything less than you being on the edge of your seat.

"The problem is when you're doing it in the theatre, do I act that night for this [cinema streaming]? Or do I act for the guy that's in the back of the amphitheatre?

"What I think is amazing now - and I don't know whether it's an interplay between the live relay and the theatre - is for somebody like Jonas and a good few others is that really the operative acting, the big gesture stuff, doesn't feel right anyway.

"In the context of an opera house, I think we're all finding a way to project sincere emotions to the back of the auditorium."

Kaufmann, who is making his debut in the role of Otello, said: "It's a question I've been asked many times, whether I will change for a live relay. I always answer 'not a hair'.

"Ive experienced myself, both being on stage and in the audience, I see immediately if somebody is honest on stage or not.

"Acting doesn't mean pretending to be someone. Acting means slipping like a glove into this character and just living it.

"If you manage to be able to do that you don't need to change anything. The natural gestures and movements and positions read also in a distance.

"You can see the back of somebody and you know the mood, if it's done in the right way.

"There's no need to do everything big just because you're far away."

He added he had accepted the part after years of interventions, after feeling he was now mature enough to sing it with enough experience and without harming his voice.

"I can't tell now exactly the amount of offers I got for this part a long time ago, because everyone who hears that voice thinks this is the role and keeps forgetting that you need an enormous amount of experience to survive in that part.

"I waited a really long time but I thought: if not now, when? It has to be done at a certain point, and under the best possible circumstances, and so here we are."

Otello runs at the Royal Opera House from June 21 to July 15.
 






 
 
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