I meant to publish this about a week ago. I told Barbara and Keith to expect it. Then I lost interest and then i got distracted. Then I sent you all a message about how I wanted your news, then I got lots of your news. Meanwhile I thought I would drop in some images, then I couldn’t be bothered . Then I could … below = Barber of Seville + The Magic Flute + Tales of Hoffmann + Cenerentola – All Mid Wales Opera productions

It starts here

Two dear friends from my opera directing past sent us a Christmas card. I checked that the e-mail address I had for them was still connected and to my delight they responded by saying yes and I responded by saying that I would fill them in on all that has come to pass since I arrived at my operatic apogee and started on my descent back to earth via yo-yo.uk.com, lots of ‘learning for life’, an academia job and illness. This may end up being a stroll through the last twenty five year of my life so, Barbara and Keith buckle up. Don’t worry it’s not an end of life review in order that the kids know for future autobiographies when dad flipped from a kind of cool theatre director type to very dull academic type and they determine never to make a similar mistake, but if it does come to serve that purpose ….The rest of you have probably heard it all before in previous self indulgent history posts so you can skip again TO THE END. That probably means you have been able to skip all but about four lines of this post – so RESULT.

I have had time to assess how interesting or otherwise this post might be and I have concluded that it isn’t super interesting. However I have started and I will finish but I will conclude this post as my operatic career hits the buffers rather than following through to the point when my entrepreneurial career also hits the buffers and then my academic one meets the same fate. They will come later. Let’s call this bit

Opera and why I went of it or perhaps it went off me

Barbara and Keith (Mid Wales Opera) represent in so many ways the best days of my opera directing career both artistically, (I did some good quality work) and emotionally, from the point of enjoyment, (I really had a great time doing it.)  Barbara and Keith used to laugh at my jokes and so did the Newtown audiences where all the shows premiered. I would say there is no better way to judge a decent production of a comic opera than getting a laugh in Newtown. Of course the singing matters more but that wasn’t my job.

I had stumbled into opera directing through pure bravado while at college. “Would anyone like to direct an Opera?” “Yes please” I said. I stuck at it, became somewhat better, never that good but by the time of Mid Wales Opera I think (like a middling quality wine) I wasn’t going to get any better however long I was ‘put down.’

Outside of MWO I was an ok director when dealing with comedy or fantasy but frankly hopeless with the tragic staples of the operatic repertoire. My attempts at Rigoletto, Carmen, Boheme and alike in all bring quite bad. My productions of the middle ground that Mozart occupied between comedy and drama were ok. I don’t really know why this was but I suspect in the end I didn’t really care as much about the consumptive victims so rudely killed off by 19th century Italian misogynist musical masters as I cared about the dadaist chair choreography one could rustle up for a rousing comedic finale where plot and all things other than vocal virtuosity have long since left the building. My lack of belief in the virtues of serious art continues to this day. Serious art seems easy when compared to funny art (if that were true of course I should have done it better). Anyway as my career progressed, my confidence faded and so my anxieties increased. I can remember vividly nights not being able to sleep despite having the most luxurious accommodation with B&K at the top of a beautiful weavers house in a village in Wales, fretting about the show and why it wasn’t working. I must have still been working as an AD at Glyndebourne (my chronology is all shot), I taught at Birmingham Conservatoire (did some fun and crazily ambitious things with Keith there) was assisting Sir Peter Hall at the National, helping to run a modern music theatre company with my dearest oldest friend Paul Barker and Caroline Sharman and generally riding quite high, but my nerve was shot  and it became inevitable I would have to bail out. The climax came in China when the show I was directing with the diva Ileana Cotrubas ran completely off the rails taking me with it and I ended up dragging a mattress around the corridors of a posh hotel in Macau trying to find a quiet place to rest my head after about a week with no sleep at all. I actually went pretty much crazy. That was after my previous hotel was evacuated in the middle of the night due to a fire, my costume designer left me to burn, and so many other absurd adventures and disasters that I keep thinking in that old man post career way, that I should write them down. Oh wait I am writing them down.

There is lots more opera career stuff I could recall but why?

So opera and I slowly parted company. It wasn’t overnight but I  remember buying a thumping big tome on Human Computer Interaction (still got it) and reading it in McDonalds next to the Birmingham Conservatoire thinking I would rather be doing something like this than directing an Opera. Computers became an extension of my imaginative space, (can’t think of a less pretentious way of putting that) but as ever, I had a persistent inclination to take things apart to figure out how they worked. (I used to drive to a guy in Northampton and buy 20 broken Olivetti computers which me and a fireman in the village would turn into 10 working ones. We loved doing it but never made any money because we ended up keeping any good ones to play with and giving away all the left overs. Actually I gave some rain soaked ones to the wife of the richest man in North Yorkshire who planned to dry them in the airing cupboard). Meanwhile my skills accrued but only ever in a glib way, thought sufficient to persuade some of the more gullible that I was some kind of extraordinary polymath, equally comfortable in both art and science. This is absolutely not true. I am very uncomfortable in science and marginally more comfortable in art but possibly quite good at making quite interesting connections between the two. In the 90’s this was sufficiently on trend to get me onto a Masters degree in interactive media at Huddersfield University despite some appalling gaps in my academic CV  eg. the absence of GCSE’s or A levels at a passing grade. I thrived and got a distinction and an MSc. My dearest beloved survived a bout of breast cancer which both enlivened us and scared us shitless. Meanwhile me and a dear friend Barry created a web design company in York and I set about keeping the wolf from the door by doing bits of opera directing including some said good work with Barbara and Keith and being an entrepreneur. Ha ha ha – you know what’s coming.

The End. Next episode soon. Although this is turning into a bit of a slog. So I may break it up into a fragmented blurt with commercial breaks songs and poems even a bit of ventriloquism.