A Noble Take On Shakespeare

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The New York Sun

Adrian Noble’s most recent New York show may have been the musical “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” but opera diehards anticipating Mr. Noble’s upcoming direction of the Metropolitan Opera’s production of “Macbeth” will take comfort in the rest of his résumé: Mr. Noble ran the Royal Shakespeare Company for 12 years.

Mr. Noble, who staged the play twice for RSC, was putting the final touches on his production last week when he quickly dispelled any notion that working with the opera meant working with second best Shakespeare. “Verdi had an extraordinary insight into Shakespeare, a way of sniffing out a play’s strong points as well as it problems,” Mr. Noble said.

Mr. Noble found this to be true in his previous staging of a Verdi work, the late comedy “Falstaff.” “Actors don’t like to play Falstaff in ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ [the opera’s source] because it’s not really a very good part — not nearly as good as in ‘Henry IV, Part One,'” Mr. Noble said. “So Verdi incorporated from that play Falstaff’s honor monologue. It was a very clever thing to do and improves the character so much.” Although “Macbeth” dates from much earlier in Verdi’s career, when the composer churned out one opera after another, Mr. Noble finds there a similar shrewdness.

“Verdi wisely dropped the English scene,” he said, citing, by contrast, Verdi’s scene of the refugees in Act 3 as a telling addition. “In this one scene, Verdi communicates the misery that Macbeth has inflicted on the people of Scotland. Then he focuses on one man — Macduff — and his family.”

Mr. Noble is currently engaged in a cycle for the Lyon Opéra of Mozart’s three Da Ponte operas, setting them in contemporary America, and his “Macbeth” takes a similar tack. “I couldn’t not do it this way — I couldn’t avoid seeing the post-World War II history in what Verdi was writing. Macbeth is a leader emerging from a civil war. He was a hugely successful soldier but amassed great power as an oppressor of his people. It’s a story that has played out in probably 20 or 30 countries since the war.”

Mr. Noble is also fascinated by the opera’s relationship between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. “It revolves around their strong sexual bond and is very dangerous. The relationship is quite deliberately shifted so that the murders are very much part of their life together. She is much more actively involved.”

Mr. Noble was asked about an article in the London Times in which experienced opera directors such as Graham Vick spoke out against the trend toward theater and film directors, who often tout their lack of opera experience. Putting aside his own experience with half a dozen operas, Mr. Noble answered as a theater director. “In Shakespeare, there is the heightened language of his poetry,” Mr. Noble said. “And the same rules apply in the opera world as on Broadway. Verdi’s finales — or Mozart’s — have rules for creating and relaxing tension to ensure an effective final curtain. People may be appalled to hear this, but the rules are the same as in ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.’ Guys like Mozart and Verdi knew exactly what they were doing. There is nothing wrong with being a craftsman as well as a genius.”


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