Trouble in Babylon

April 10, 2005
Theatre, says David Freeman, is about intimacy.

Theatre, says David Freeman, is about intimacy. "That's hard to achieve - in life, and on the stage."
Photo: Steve Baccon

David Freeman spent the 1970s freaking out the opera world with his alternative arias. He tells Melinda Houston why he's returned to Australia to direct Verdi's classic Nabucco.

What did young opera lovers do in the early '70s, when all their mates were taking loads of drugs, marching in the streets, holding love-ins, and generally plotting the overthrow of the establishment? They plotted the overthrow of the opera establishment, of course.

Warhol had The Factory. Melbourne had the Pram Factory. Sydney had the Spaghetti Factory. And David Freeman set up the Opera Factory.

"It was just a trendy name at the time," he admits, laughing. But like so much else in the '70s, it also had a higher purpose.

"I remember an elderly gentleman saying to me 'A factory - it's a dirty place. And opera is so beautiful'," Freeman says.

"But to me a factory is a place of work. The word opera itself comes from the Latin 'opus', which means work - and that's what I wanted to do. Create a place where people really worked on what they were creating."

It's an incongruous idea. Of all the arts, opera appears the most rigorous, the most disciplined, not an obvious candidate either for the freeform style of the '70s or the hard work Freeman had in mind.

"But although opera is disciplined musically, it's often pretty lazy dramatically," he says. "The company originally sprang out of my frustration with opera and theatre which was - and is - often pretty average."

After setting up the Opera Factory in Sydney in 1973, Freeman went on an academic exchange to Germany, then to Switzerland, where he established Opera Company Zurich in 1976, then Opera Factory London in 1981.

In all those places he brought the sensibility of the time - the anger and the inquiry of both the hippy and punk movements - to this most staid of musical forms.

"Opera Factory Zurich was considered outrageous," Freeman says. "It was very experimental. It did well in Zurich but it was bigger in London. We really were radical chic. To the extent that Opera magazine in London devoted a whole editorial to how we should be stopped."

Freeman took a company of 20 singers, divided them into two groups of 10, and spent a fortnight with each improvising, performing physical theatre, yoga, meditation, trance.

"And that had a very profound effect on them," he says.

"Then there was a 512-week rehearsal period. And one of the singers came to me and said, 'I'm an emotional person and this has really affected me - I'm afraid that when we start doing this I'm going to cry'. And I said 'That's quite all right. If you feel you need to cry just go outside for a moment' and from time to time she did."

But it served its purpose, bringing a new energy and emotional honesty to a moribund, old-folks entertainment.

"I think one of the big problems with theatre is that too often it's just people making speeches," Freeman says. "But to me the whole point of theatre is that act of being private in public. It's not about speeches. It's about intimacy. And that's hard to achieve - in life, and on the stage."

Odd, then, that Freeman has returned to Australia from his base in London to stage Verdi's Nabucco, a retelling of the Assyrian invasion of Jerusalem: a piece kind of short on intimacy and big on speeches.

An opera Freeman describes variously as "tricky", "rather badly written", "too much of the music having the same kind of energy" and with "one of the most underwritten love stories in the history of opera".

But don't cancel your subscription just yet. "It was one of the first operas Verdi wrote, it was his first success," Freeman says.

"And it was a success largely because of the politics of the time, the push for an independent, unified Italy. So the Jews are clearly Italians in this piece. It is a hugely political piece."

Freeman actually thought of portraying the Jews in Nabucco literally as Italians. Then he saw a poster Saddam Hussein had made of himself, painted in the style of '40s movie posters, starring Hussein as Nebuchadnezzar (Nebuchadnezzar is Nabucco in Verdi's version of the story). As well as an Old Testament Saddam riding a chariot, the poster included combat helicopters in the background.

"That was clearly how he saw himself - as the nemesis of Israel," Freeman says. "So that's where I took my inspiration from, that image, that pastiche. And the reality is, the trouble is still in Babylon, and still in Jerusalem. It's a good moment to do Nabucco."

Freeman says that while his version will be intensely political, he's not trying to make any particular political point.

"My job is to find the source of energy in the piece and release that energy. And the energy here is politics. It also has some great tunes."

Nabucco is at the State Theatre, April 13 to May 12


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