Freudian dramas

I must have seen hundreds of opera productions in my time. Out of these, hardly any made a lasting impression on account of their design: the great Tarkovsky Boris Godunov for Covent Garden; Hockney’s Rake’s Progress for Glyndebourne; Es Devlin’s Les Troyens; the Richard Peduzzi Bayreuth Ring preserved on film. Very few others.

For many opera-goers, an interventionist or bold visual approach to an opera is automatically a bad thing, and (I guess) a lot of the musicians involved are visually somewhat conservative. The ludicrous 1980s Met Ring cycle, designed by Gunther Schneider-Siemssen to follow every one of Wagner’s demands, was driven by musicians. It’s fair to guess, too, that the splendid but very innovative 1990s Ring at Covent Garden, directed by Richard Jones and designed by Nigel Lowery, was prematurely killed off from the same direction. The opportunities to do something visually interesting in the opera house are more challenging than one
might suspect

The artist Maurice Sendak had a late entry into the world of theatrical design, which flourished into an effective and interesting career. He is best known as a writer and illustrator of books for children, most famously of Where the Wild Things Are. Other exquisitely produced classics are the Biedermeier-inflected Outside Over There and the knockabout In The Night Kitchen. Their look, of muted colours, a sepia carnival, is unmistakable; and Sendak took great care to preserve that specific chromatic atmosphere in his stage excursions.

He is a medley of eclectic allusions, including Mozart, Walt Disney and, especially, Freud. Sendak lived with the psychoanalyist Eugene Glynn for 50 years, and Freudian mythology consciously shapes much of his imagery and drama. It is no accident, for instance, that the baby-rescuing heroine of Outside Over There is called Id(a).