With its origins in ancient Roman myth, the brutal rape that lies at its centre, its mannered libretto and its explicit Christian messages, The Rape of Lucretia is the quintessential “difficult” opera – despite its extraordinary power. Much of this power comes from its intense intimacy: writing for much smaller forces than the “grand opera” Peter Grimes that preceded this work, Benjamin Britten uses virtuosic vocal writing and eerie orchestral textures to weave together a hard-hitting, atmospheric theatre work that sounds and feels unlike anything else in the repertory.
The Rape of Lucretia premiered at Glyndebourne in 1946 in a staging with studiously “Roman” designs by John Piper that artfully and deliberately created distance between creator and subject matter. When asked why he wrote the piece, Britten typically (and evasively) answered “because I’m rather interested in that kind of thing, you know”.
But stripped of togas, pillars and heavy makeup, Lucretia becomes a shocking and contemporary work, precisely because it was so personal to its composer. Britten had observed with horror the final stages of the second world war – Germany’s total destruction, the mass rape of its female population, the revelation of the Holocaust and the dropping of the atom bombs. Like a British theatre artist of a later generation – Sarah Kane, writer of Blasted – with The Rape of Lucretia, Britten makes an absolute connection between the macho exigencies of war and the tragic brutalisation of the individual. Rape and war are products of one another: the most ordinary of spaces (in Britten the family home, in Kane a hotel room) become the settings for explosive acts of violation. In both works, the personal cataclysm of rape is a signifier of war-as-apocalypse – the ultimate symbol of humanity’s conflict-induced degradation.
In Britten’s works, the subjects of abuse and violation are never far from the surface, from Grimes to Death in Venice. As a gay man when homosexuality was still illegal, it’s unsurprising that Britten inverted opera’s traditionally overt (and often tediously garrulous) expressions of emotion, and replaced them with utterances that are pithy, repressed, brittle and codified. As with his hero Henry James, in Britten the unsaid is just as important as what is said – a remarkable innovation for a lyric artform, movingly typified in his long and beautiful climactic solo for cor anglais in Lucretia. Here, words are no longer sufficient to express the endless pain of a woman driven to total despair.
But for all its dramatic and musical strengths, The Rape of Lucretia is a difficult work to stage today. Its often awkward text has worn less well than its extraordinary music, while its subject matter sits in a long and uncomfortable operatic tradition of fetishised female suffering. On the other hand, opera’s power – like that of Greek tragedy – rests on its fearless treatment of taboos and the extreme experiences that compel people to sing – that most primal means of human expression. Despite its reputation for decadent artifice, opera is at its most moving when it deals with realities; and rape, tragically, continues to be one of the most bitter realities of contemporary life. As Joanna Bourke notes in her magisterial book Rape, A History from 1860 to the Present, the number of rapes have soared since the 1960s, while conviction rates remain scandalously low (only 3% of rapes recorded by the police in the year up to March 2022 led to charges). Meanwhile, events in Ukraine have only confirmed Britten and Kane’s dismal analysis of the link between conflict and bodily violation. In this sense at least, The Rape of Lucretia remains a story with potent urgency: Lucretia’s awful predicament is representative of rape victims the world over.
But how to tell this story at all? Britten wisely places the act of penetration off stage, though depicts the moments immediately before it. Representing any act of rape on stage remains a daunting task: few equivalent operas engender a bigger sense of responsibility. As a director (and especially as a male director), it requires a moment of self-reflection. Can a man really tell this story? Yes, if one believes that storytelling is the ultimate exercise in empathy and that the ability to tell a story does not have to be related to one’s personal experience. That through deep self-education (from Bourke’s work to A Woman in Berlin’s famous descriptions of the Red Army’s crimes in 1945) one can find the insights to portray this story responsibly and truthfully. That in this story’s essentially gendered conflict, it is vital to understand and portray the role of the male perpetrator alongside that of the female victim. And that by working with an all-female creative team, one can foreground female voices and perspectives in a story which absolutely demands them.
Finally, directing is about drawing the best from performers: a function not only of rigorous and precise work, but also of a supportive and safe rehearsal room. We worked closely with intimacy coordinator Ita O’Brien and movement director Sarita Piotrowski on making scenes that honour the truth and continued relevance of this story, while respecting human feelings of discomfort and vulnerability. In the old days, performers and audience alike had merely to accept traumatic material: today we place similar emphasis on alerting our audience to what they will see and hear, treating subjects with the sensitivity they deserve.
The Rape of Lucretia will never be an opera like Carmen or The Marriage of Figaro, drawing in large crowds. It is a strange, unsettling, at times unbearably private piece, but it will remain a work whose originality and unique force will continue to trouble audiences for as long as the awful crime at its centre blights humankind.
• Oliver Mears is the Royal Opera’s director of opera. His staging of The Rape of Lucretia, produced by Britten Pears Arts in collaboration with the Royal Opera, is at the Linbury theatre, London, 13-22 November.
