Born and raised in Port Talbot, south Wales, Adele Thomas, 41, is an award-winning director noted for her highly physical, pared-back stagings for theatre and opera. Since directing student theatre while at Cambridge University, she has worked across the UK and abroad. Shows include The Oresteia and Thomas Tallis at Shakespeare’s Globe, and Under Milk Wood at the Royal & Derngate theatre in Northampton. She now works predominantly in opera and has directed Vivaldi’s Bazajet (Royal Opera House and Irish National Opera), Handel’s Berenice and, earlier this year, In the Realms of Sorrow at the London Handel festival with Stone Nest. Thomas makes her Glyndebourne festival debut this summer with Handel’s Semele (23 July-26 August). Her production of Verdi’s Il trovatore, already seen in Zurich, will be at the Royal Opera House, London, 2 June-2 July.
We should start with your Welsh background, and the way it feeds into your work.
I come from a traditional working-class background. When I was growing up in Port Talbot, it was a place to escape from, to rail against. London, the metropolitan life, seemed to be where I should be. The expectation at school was that we’d be lucky to get a job in the town’s steelworks, directly opposite the school. Ambition wasn’t encouraged. Now I feel totally differently. I realise that the place has a sort of magic to it. It’s like a creative wellspring. So many actors have come from there: Richard Burton, Anthony Hopkins, Michael Sheen. That sense of the Welsh bard, the lone beautiful speaker walking across the hillside – that really carries through to acting. And the collective idea of performance is reflected in Welsh choral singing. But directing? Standing up and telling others how to do it? That’s something I didn’t know about, growing up.
