Orpha Phelan: ‘I’m very bossy, and I’m clear and organised. I can make things happen’

It’s not often that an Irish director gets to direct operas back to back in Ireland. But Orpha Phelan is in the middle of doing it. She directed a rapturously received production of Félicien David’s Thomas Moore-inspired Lalla-Roukh for Wexford Festival Opera last month. And she’s now in the middle of directing a 12-stop touring production of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale for Irish National Opera.

Wexford, she says, was “an intense experience” because, as she puts it, “the schedule in Wexford is like no other schedule. After my first three days working with the cast, I ended on stage with the chorus for the first time, and two days after that I was running Act I. And Act I of Lalla-Roukh is by far the bigger half, if you can have a bigger half. The pre-interval part is much longer, and the chorus was on stage for the entire thing.”

There’s a beautiful spirit in Wexford. Everybody is there, some of them are very far away from home

She describes it as “a bit like running before you can walk. It seems that it won’t work, but it does.” She says, “There’s a beautiful spirit in Wexford. Everybody is there, some of them are very far away from home. Nobody is leaving at weekends to do other things, because it’s so hard to get to. There’s a sense of us all being ... I wouldn’t go so far as saying it’s like being on summer camp together. But, you know, there is a lovely, collegiate feel.”

We talk about constraints on time, about how sometimes less can be more, and I mention being told that the merging of the BBC Northern Ireland Orchestra and the Ulster Orchestra more than 40 years ago was done on a compressed schedule, with the goal of concentrating minds in a way that a looser, freer approach might not have achieved.

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She relates this directly to the INO Don Pasquale which, in terms of opera norms, she was asked to do “relatively late in the day”. Because of her schedule she felt she had to impose conditions. At the end of April, the date of the offer, “I said I need to have all of my concept, designs and 95 per cent of the big decisions made by the end of May.” Given what was already in her diary, that was the extent of her window of opportunity.

“I don’t know if it’s because of that,” she says, “the pressure that I put on myself, or because it’s just a really, really good piece, it’s kind of faultless – in some ways, in the ways I need it to be faultless – but I have never, ever had ideas come as thick and fast as they have for this Don Pasquale. Within half a day I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I had thoughts for nearly every scene. And I didn’t even know the opera beforehand. I was starting from scratch.” There was, she says, “no time to get lost in irrelevancies”.

On one level, she says, the work is “a really nasty piece. You’ve got Don Pasquale, who’s very unlikeable, and who’s trying to stand in the way of love. Does that make it okay that his nephew Ernesto, and his nephew’s girlfriend Norina, and his doctor Malatesta – his doctor! – gang up against him and try to manipulate him. I just found this whole idea of the manipulation of the elderly very hard to stomach.

“My father died earlier this year and I think maybe I’m particularly sensitive to how the elderly are treated at the moment. I took that bit quite personally and I really wanted these people to get their comeuppance. I was trying to devise a politically correct Don Pasquale of our times that would really stand up to these youngsters.”

You just can’t resist that music. It’s delicious, it’s constantly propelling you towards the end

But, of course, Don Pasquale is a comedy, always ready to offer laughs at the foibles of an old man. “I’m not letting go of my disapproval,” she says. “But you just can’t resist that music. It’s delicious, it’s constantly propelling you towards the end. It’s kind of one gag after another. The music just serves up moment after moment. You have to, as a director, respond to those ... and to the momentum and to the fact that the whole thing is based on artifice and pretence, people pretending to be who they’re not, masquerading, improvising.”

Her big idea for the piece, she says, “came to me in a flash. The reason was that I needed to figure out who Malatesta was. Like with Mozart’s Così fan tutte, if you figure out who Don Alfonso is then everything falls into place. Malatesta is Dr Malatesta, in this world where everybody is changing and pretending to be somebody who they’re not, and it all feels quite superficial. They want the money, they’ll do anything to get the it. And Don Pasquale doesn’t really care, as long as he gets a wife, somebody who’ll provide him with an heir. I thought, it’s so full of pretence and artifice that Dr Malatesta has to be a plastic surgeon. I started exploring that and it just answered every single gag that was needed, every problem that came up.”

Two weeks into rehearsal she still sounds fired up by the way it’s working out. “It’s such fun. It’s a great cast.” Graeme Danby, the Don Pasquale, she already knows from her Irish Times Irish Theatre Award-nominated production of Rossini’s La Cenerentola. “He’s a tour de force,” she says. Kelli-Ann Masterson, the soprano singing Norina who masquerades as a mild-mannered wife for Don Pasquale, has “fabulous comic timing. Baritone Ben McAteer, the Malatesta, “who was in my Lalla-Roukh, he’s brilliant”. And the Congo-born French tenor Patrick Kabongo, the Ernesto (boyfriend of Norina and nephew of Don Pasquale), is “delicious as well”. She calls them “a really tight little team”.

For me Lalla-Roukh was in some ways a terrible story. The idea of doing something traditional with it would have not sat well with me at all

Her concerns about the nasty side of Don Pasquale and a range of issues that had to be negotiated in a 21st-century production of Lalla-Rookh, which presents a very 19th-century view of the orient, prompts a question about the way some works in the historic opera canon are becoming problematic in the light of contemporary sensitivities.

She sounds optimistic about the issue. “You can find ways around it. For me Lalla-Roukh was in some ways a terrible story. The idea of doing something traditional with it would have not sat well with me at all. But one finds ways around doing old pieces, like Don Pasquale or Lalla-Roukh or things that don’t fit so well, and you can always find solutions to them. But the question is, how will new pieces work? What subject matter will be considered to be off-limits and on-limits? And more and more and more seems to be off-limits these days.”

She mentions Thomas Adès’s Powder Her Face which she directed in an award-winning production for Royal Danish Opera. “It is a very personal story about the Duchess of Argyll, it’s not about humanity in general. That’s another really unpleasant story. A woman looking back on her life in which she’s made loads of mistakes, and the audience kind of just laughs at her throughout. That’s a nasty piece as well.” She does, however, think that “more and more commissions will be based upon boxes being ticked. Maybe that’s a good thing. Because there are voices out there that have never been heard, and there are voices out there that still need to be heard. Neither should they be denied in favour of others.”

I ask about how she became an opera director. “When I was at UCG many years ago, I didn’t really know what an opera director was. I can just tell you about my path. Which involves me going to London, to the big lights in the bright city, and going to see lots and lots of operas and thinking, well, I want to be involved in this in some way. And, looking at my talents and what I was good at and, more precisely, what I wasn’t good at.”

She knew she wouldn’t be able to conduct or sing or “do many of the things that I understood to be essential to the art form. But then I realised, my goodness, there is this role and I could be involved. I could be a director. Because I’m really good at telling people what to do. I’m very bossy, and I’m clear and organised. And, as I get older – this is one of the benefits of getting older – I care less about being liked. I’m not saying I’m not liked. But, as a result, I’m very efficient, I can make things happen.”

Irish National Opera’s Don Pasquale tours to Letterkenny, Navan, Galway, Ennis, Dundalk, Kilkenny and Dún Laoghaire between Saturday, November 26th, and Sunday, December 11th. The tour resumes in February, with Rhodri Prys Jones replacing Patrick Kabongo as Ernesto, playing in Bray, Waterford, Cork, Limerick and Tralee between Thursday 2nd and Saturday 11th.