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I got a dayjob as an usher at the Royal Opera House. I had good notions of acting direction, and admiration for some directors such as Robert Lepage’s highly hightened theatricality or Deborah Warner’s mega-contemporary takes on classics, but little did I know that sitting through a season of operas in the best house in the world would change my life forever. Just by watching, I learned from the most brilliant series of work I could ever see in the space of six months: Lepage precisely, David Mc Vicar, and most importantly Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser’s duo as directors. By simply watching and frenetically taking notes at the back of the auditorium, I was understanding what it means to have a proper vision of a stage, beyond the place of the performer, but through the lens of a bigger picture creator, a painter, a crowd-manager and almost a block-busteresque director. And I then knew I wanted to direct.

After deciding I couldn’t continue being at the front of houses, I left the Royal Opera House, having been taught an immense lesson. In June of that same year, I was putting on my first play as a director. It was a four-hander which contained what I felt was a very operatic way of creating images. To achieve this, I manically researched articles and interviews by each director whose work I’d encountered.  Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser were the most articulate of all and their process fascinated me. One of their ideas became my motto, how an image can be anything as long as the audience can clearly see an obvious relation between what they see and the story being told through the direction. I applied these principles scrupulously at the scale of a studio theatre (Jermyn Street theatre to be precise) setting my play on a beach with a magical fridge standing like a symbolist cornucopia… And it worked ! The audience read the symbol, and I carried on directing !

My belief in the need for a vision and a strong concept was later confirmed in a Young Vic masterclass led by Daniel Kramer (now artistic director of the ENO) and I also probably overused it a little. But it certainly led to some foundation pieces that are still very representative of my identity as a director, like my first critical success, a version of Sartre’s The Flies with a live Rock-Band standing as the only physical and atmospherical set in order to create a visceral show. Music already played an important part in my work. In the decade that followed, I became a proper director. Through training, devising, experimenting, researching and developing my work, I got a little less focused on my ‘concept’ as an 'auteur’, and refined my craft along the way, re-placing the performer at the centre of my vision and my process. And by conciliating my background as an actor with this learning, my work finally reached a shape of its own and resulted last year in my production of 'Rock N Roll’ Moliere, The Doctor in Spite of Himself. This is the best accolade I got since coming to London. A dozen rave reviews and a nomination for an Off West End award as best director. But this welcomed recognition, at a time when I could have honestly given up, came not because I was seeing myself as a genius 'auteur’ but quite the opposite, it was because I accepted to be lost and to explore a crafty creative way, trusting my skills, rather than relying on formal overarching 'one-man vision’, it was about the work first. And this success is what gave me the courage to get back in touch with the Royal Opera House, ten years after.

In autumn 2016, I met with Amy Lane, staff director of the ROH. I told her my story, how important Opera was in my journey, and how I was drawn back to Opera as a sort of birthplace. Of course, I had done a little bit of Opera in the meantime by assisting at the Geneva Opera Studio, led by conductor Jean-Marie Curti, and I was already familiar with directing singers, musicians and some of the elements of this artform. I had also worked backstage in West-End shows so I knew the technicalities of big shows but I lacked the experience of working at such a scale and within such a place of excellence, which is what had inspired me in the first place. I was eager to learn how to manage such huge undertakings as Operas in one of the most important houses in the world. When I mentionned Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser among my most important inspirations, Amy smiled. A week later, I had one of the best surprises of my life: I would be guest director observer on Caurier and Leiser’s reprise of Madama Butterfly ! The very Opera that had triggered my whole journey ten years ago. Again, little did I know that these five weeks would change my life as a director for the second time.

In the building, the Opera company cohabits with the Ballet company and the Music department. In the Opera company solely, I’ve worked under the authority of the staff directors’ office who deals with everything related to directors from scheduling rehearsals to actually directing the shows on stage. This is done in cooperation with the Company’s office who manage the schedule of the singers, actors and all artists involved. They all also work in coordination the stage management, the costumes, and every department in the house. The first part of my bservership consisted of following Andrew Sinclair, the main assistant director in charge of putting the production of Madama Butterfly back on its feet, before the directors actually arrived. He was assisted by Hazel Gould, who would then remain the assistant director in charge when the production would later be on stage. I have to thank Hazel for accepting a permanent buzz of questions in her ear from me and allowing me to follow her and even her thoughts, like a shadow, most of the time. She shared so much and so openly with me. My first observations were very pragmatic ones, confirming things I already do in theatre. You need to understand your 'production profile’, break down the score in scenes or sections, prepare your knowledge of each scene, structure your work schedule, your calls for the cast, the rotas in the building and block or walk through the scenes with the singers/actors. These all seem like obvious directorial tasks but the scale of it is what makes the difference.

As a revival is supposed to be able to repeat as long as you want, there are hundreds of notes made on every staff’s score, from the assistant director’s to the stage manager’s, and as many layers of notes as there were revivals of the show. You have to make sense of it all and Andrew started his preparation 6 months ago to familiarize himself with the production. By watching different videos of the same show, making his own notes, crossing them with the ones from the previous directors. When I think of the fact that I was proud to just be able to follow the score on the first day of rehearsal, it seems ridiculous in comparison to Andrew who could give a precise musical figure on his first day too and the start of any sections in Italian…
In Madama Butterfly, there are 'only’ 5 principals, 1 gigantic automatic set, 3 acts and 'just’ one scene with 40 members of the chorus (that makes about 50 costumes and full make up to do before Act 1) ! But still, the production is considered 'light’…. Although when someone from the shoes department came down separately from the costumes’ team, I truly realised the scale of the work !
It’s impossible to comprehend the amount of work going on in the building until you’re a small part of it. If you decide to move a rehearsal on the main stage, chances are you’re impacting on four different departments and adding a night shift for the stage crews in charge of the wagons. 'The wagons ?’ I hear you ask. Yes, the whole backstage area is moveable on wagons which can accommodate as many sets as there are productions on stage during the same period, whether ballets or Operas. What makes me fitted for Opera I think, is my curiosity and obsession over Tetris, understanding how everything fits together, and taking notes all the time about the mecanism of things in order to understand this big machine.

And of course, there is the soul of it all, the music. A huge and sacred part of the work and the main character of any performance performed at the Royal Opera House. Antonio Pappano, the musical director and main conductor of the House is simply a genius. When he walks into a rehearsal room, you can sense the atmosphere being uplifted with perfection. Atttached to Madama Butterfly is also Renato Balsadonna who was resident chorus master for ten years and makes his debut as a main conductor at the ROH. And in rehearsals, the pianist repetiteur, James, who plays Puccini like it’s a second nature. All their knowledge of music and of the nuances of Puccini appear every time they clarify a note to the singers. And everyone agrees that the particularity of the Royal Opera House is that Pappano is not only concerned by the music itself as a thing of beauty, but as a dramatic story-telling element. With Pappano, music is acting, and he knows his energy also conducts the intentions and the drama. For him, it’s about supporting the story being told. I’ve even heard him say to a singer 'don’t sing it beautifully, it’s already beautiful, that’s in the music and you have a beautiful voice so just play the situation’. Sometimes the music plays something that you don’t have to act and great conductors like Pappano or Balsadonna know it.

When you meet the whole orchestra, the level of expertise takes you to another dimension. Again, if these musicians are in the Royal Opera House symphonic orchestra, it’s because they are amongst the best musicians in the world. And the conductor acts also like a conductive piece, in the electrical sense: he transmits the energy of the production by talking them through the action, or just by telling them how beautifully Butterfly is acting at a certain moment. At a one point in an orchestra rehearsal, I heard Pappano starting to tell the orchestra what was happening in the show just as they were playing: 'She draws the knife and as she’s about to kill herself, the kid comes running in the room’. The music was lifted, every musician was playing along as he spoke to them. It was wonderful.

You can direct everything to the music: every emotional crescendos in acting, every moment of stillness where only the music should play, every dynamic set moves, each gesture or micro-movement, because each of these details tells a story. Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier are experts at doing this. They consider themselves 'Opera directors’ since they hardly ever touch another artform. They’ve directed all over the world. They are seen as incredible image-makers and have indeed created a vast iconography around their work. Though, they explained to me that these images are not the first choices they make, these visual concepts could be anything in their form. Their first choices are essential ones, about the depth of the story they want to tell.

For Madama Butterfly, they’ve chosen to direct it like the tragedy that it is, in the ancient noble sense, not just a simple love drama like it’s mostly done, but a deep universal, fatal, yet simple tale. And all the choices they made follow this major rule. First and most strinkingly, the vast empty zen space (designed by Christian Fenouillat) allows the characters to evolve at the scale of an antique amphi-theatre, and not in a picturesque little doll house with a garden like it’s mostly the case. In their production, everything is simple and pure in order to focus on the sense of the conversation happening between the characters. Here, they’re not creating pretty images of japanese landscapes, they are using huge symbolic painted backdrops to create a sensation of Japan rather than a detailed postcard. They also direct singers a lot like theatre actors. It’s about transcending the form of Opera by seeking the truth of the relationships between the characters, making them think about their internal motivations and believe what they say, not just sing it.

Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier are very precise in the way they direct both the higher stakes and the details of the dialogues. Sometimes in rehearsals, one can wonder why stop at every figure, when the singing is near perfection. And then, when you get to a stage and orchestra rehearsal, you see the bigger three-dimensionnal-200sqft picture they’ve created and you understand why they did it so carefully: At this stage, in the huge 2000 seater that is the Royal Opera House, every choice you made is multiplied by ten and if you made the wrong ones, they are going to blow up in your face once in the auditorium. Moshe spent hours on a very intense moment for the main character of Butterfly as he was not getting enough shattering emotion but 'just’ sadness, 'Sadness is easy, he said, but it’s cute, and I can just switch the tv off and forget about it. Here we want something excruciating, a shock for the audience’. Indeed, he was so right, if not directed properly in the rehearsal room, it can just be pathos in the main house and this is a usual risk when Puccini is badly produced. Because Puccini is such a master of story-telling, his scenes are very short and there is only essential dialogues. So you do have to 'place’ the stakes of the character at the exact level in order to reach the brilliance of the composer.

And thanks to the high stakes and to how the directors have delved into and the truthfulness of Puccini’s own perfection, Leiser and Caurier’s Butterfly production for the ROH is the most succesful revival done regularly over the last fifteen years. It’s also thanks to what Andrew Sinclair, the resident director, calls 'their magic’. I remember when I first saw the production ten years ago, I was struck by how they created simple but also heart-wrenching moments, by just bringing to an image one single element that can tear your heart out: the bonze coming from the horizon, the backdrop of stars at the end of Act one, the shadow of Pinkerton’s wife in act three, or finally the simplicity of the last image, that I won’t spoil here, which is extraordinarily tragic ! All these moments seem simple but they are highly thought through, connected to the contemporary world, and therefore, to a contemporary audience. Leiser directs with very immediate references: the character of Pinkerton is compared to Trump during the 2017 rehearsals (he probably referred to Bush twelve years ago). In any case, by giving a very concrete and detailed existence, both in the acting-direction and the images created, their visions are striking and their work appear seemless. This is the magic of Posh and Mosh…

The reviews proved it several times already over the years but this 2017 revival was particularly acclaimed thanks to the impressive cast led by Ermonela Jaho as Butterfly, Marcelo Puentes as Pinkerton, Scott Hendricks as Sharpless, Elisabeth DeShong as Suzuki, and Carlo Bosi as Goro. Watching them has taught me so much about singers. First, they are also without a doubt the best in the world, they’re incredibly strong and powerful and they are perfect for their parts. Casting at the ROH is known worldly for being of a very high standard. So you, as a director, need to be on top of your game as well.

Just like they know their score well in advance, you need to know your production from every angle. You need to be able to know everybody’s trajectory on the stage, every subtext you want them to carry. You need to give a sense of perspective on each character and know the meaning of everything for everyone in a scene. This means being able to respond to an internal motivation question as well as to the purpose of a character or his action at a certain moment of the show. You can’t just answer with your intuition, you have to justify each demand with your knowledge of stagecraft, and rely on the music to support your choices. You also have to bear in mind the unimaginable physical demands of singing 'full voice’ to the biggest houses in the world and the technicalities of singing like simply taking their cues from the conductor. All of this should enter into the mix of your directing. One of the only difficulties for a director in Opera might be that singers often sing the same part in different productions and that they have a version of their part slightly embedded in their body. Your job then is to fulfil the vision of the director, to guide them as much as possible through what they should do on stage, guide what they should feel in relation to their partners and to the music. It’s easier said than done, but it’s still as easy task to find answers to any questions because every measure, every note, every gesture tells a story. You’ll always find an answer to keep the 'spirit’ of the production by searching through the notes made on a one of your team’s score…whether the note you’ll find is from 2005 or yesterday is another story !

The cast of this revival of Madama Butterfly were one of the best and fun teams I’ve ever had the chance to work with. And Marcelo and I bonded over the fact that ten years ago, he too was a young waiter just opposite the ROH and was yearning to come back her one day. The parallel was touching.

During this past decade, I’ve learnt to structure my work, to frame my intuition as an artist, and to articulate my practice, all with small teams of people, running my own company. What I learnt by working at the Royal Opera House in just five weeks is:

First, that I was right to find my own structure, which is comforting because it’s not easy becoming pragmatic about the art, without guidance. I can now do this.

Secondly, there are many aspects in which my journey and my intuition as an experienced practitionner have proven to be very useful. In particular, my theatre background was very in keeping with the director’s demands of the singers.

Most importantly, I’ve learned that these good intuitions and this 'talent’ partly, matter only for the public, for the end-result, but are really not enough. If you’re working in such a worldy renowned place, you’re probably talented but no-one really cares about it amongst your colleagues. What matters here is your structure, how you can collaborate, your intelligence in dealing with all the talents that are contributing to your work as a director. And there are so many minds working with you. Antonio Pappano says that working on Opera is a great mix of intelligence and intuition.

Talking to the Maestro in the Cafeteria once, I said I felt very lucky to have been given the opportunity to properly start my journey in Opera at the ROH, almost too lucky because since then, everyone I meet has been telling me that Covent Garden is one of the best structured houses in the world and that I will never find such quality in every aspect anywhere else. Pappano smiled and said nothing. That smile was the simplest way to say it all. Him and people like Renato, Moshe or Andrew are rare models for me. They don’t seek egotistic genius recognition, they actually took the ego completely out of it. You have to, because when you deal with as many people as they do, not only are you in charge, but you’re also under constant scrutiny over every decision you make and it demands a masterful professional gravitas.

That’s what I did not expect to find in Opera. The meaning somehow of everything I was already striving for in my work as artistic director of my own company. In particular, I found an answer to a question I’m often asked: Why do you want to work at such scale ? Why don’t you do a solo ? Why don’t you put on lighter shows, star in it and get produced, you’re talented, you could do well? Why don’t you do things for yourself?  And one day, in a Sitzprobe (orchestra and singers’ rehearsal), as a lot of the other departments came down, all the music team, the directors, a dozen students from the royal academy of music, six internationally renowned singers, and Antonio Pappano conducting with the most beautiful grace and softness Act 3 of Madama Butterfly. The music was of course beautiful but at one point, not a hugely emotional point though, I was looking at all these talents, all these human brains working together at creating beauty. There were about a hundred people in the room. And I was so taken by it, that I started crying very softly in front of a scene I’d already seen rehearsed a dozen times before. And I knew that it was not only because Puccini was terribly good, but also because I had my answer to the questions. Why don’t I go solo? Because I don’t care. I care about the collectiveness, about a group of human beings working together at creating wonders. That’s all I’m passionate about, that’s what holds my shows together, that’s what I teach my drama students and that’s why my company is called Exchange Theatre. This is no intuition anymore, it’s a statement for my practice. That’s why the ROH changed my life for a second time.