Ausrine Stundyte has been in the room for just over two minutes when she looks me in the eye and declares: “I am totally not a feminist.” I am slightly taken aback. Moments earlier, I had been watching the Lithuanian soprano rehearse Leoš Janáček’s opera The Makropulos Case, which the Royal Opera is staging for the first time this autumn, in a new production by Katie Mitchell. Stundyte takes the work’s central role – and Mitchell is a director famous for her explicitly feminist approach.
Stundyte, it turns out, has also surprised herself. A few days after we speak, she emails a clarification: she isn’t against women’s rights. But it bothers her, she explains, when “women see men as the problem and themselves as victims. When you put yourself in the role of a victim, you give away your own power.”
