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• A contemporary setting
• Creative choices

A contemporary setting

Responding to the tyranny of totalitarian rule at the heart of Shakespeare’s play and the tension between two very different worlds, director Rory Kinnear chose to set the opera in an imagined but vivid contemporary world loosely inspired by ex-Soviet satellite states around the turn of the millennium. After the Second World War, many Eastern and Central European countries were occupied by the Soviet Union and remained under their control. Through forced coalition governments and the liquidation of opposition parties, Soviet communist systems were established in these Satellite States, with control of politics, police, radio, press and cultural output. By the 1990s, many states had gained back their independence from the Soviet Union through violent civil unrest and ethnic strife. But tensions between bordering countries with very different balances of power, lifestyle and economies intensified.

The neighbouring countries of Azerbaijan and Armenia provided a starting point for Kinnear’s imagined worlds of Sicilia and Bohemia: one nominally democratic state which has been ruled by the same powerful family for generations, next to a more rural, gentle and less economically prosperous country. The traditional male leadership of these countries, where women have little voice, resonate with Hermione’s plight. Kinnear also noted Shakespeare’s reference to Hermione as the daughter of the Russian empire.

Creative choices

The opera presents a world in which humans aim to take control but where the forces of nature dominate. Kinnear wished to expose relationships between the characters onstage as entirely subservient to a natural world; water, fire, storms, flowers all have as much impact on the opera’s narrative as the actions of the characters. In the play, there is a famous stage direction that Antigonus is ‘pursued off-stage by a bear’. The bear signals the play’s shift to the outside, rural world of Bohemia. In this production the bear is instead represented by the constellation of Ursa Major in the night sky, reinforcing the cycles of day and night which govern the earth.

Another creative choice made by Kinnear and Wigglesworth was to write the character of Mamillius (the son of Leontes and Hermione) as a silent role performed by a young actor. Mamillius’ role has been extended to become the storyteller, existing both inside and outside the play’s narrative.

Find out more from Ryan Wigglesworth and cast members Iain Paterson, Sophie Bevan and Leigh Melrose about rehearsing The Winter’s Tale: