When a bunch of unruly British tourists caused havoc around the country back in 2019, the general director of the New Zealand Opera Thomas de Mallet Burgess was struck by a bolt of inspiration. It was a Shakespearean story that seemed ripe for the stage.
But when NZ Opera announced the Unruly Tourists production earlier this year, it was met with controversy and a third of the board resigned in apparent protest against the company’s new artistic direction.
De Mallet Burgess, who originally hails from the UK, is undeterred. He has helmed unconventional productions around the globe and says if the artform is to remain relevant it must address contemporary social issues – from Trumpism to family violence – and some core repertoire works should be discontinued, at least temporarily.
Photo: Supplied
He tells Kim Hill that, all things going well, the opera will premiere at the Auckland Arts Festival in March next year.
De Mallet Burgess arrived in New Zealand at a similar time to the tourists and was in the process of getting to know New Zealand.
"One of the things that caught my attention first was the fact that they were labelled 'the Irish tourists' and, coming originally from the UK, I knew that this particular group of people belonged to the traveller community.
"When this was pointed out, instead of becoming the English tourists, they became the 'unruly' tourists. That seemed strange to me and I wondered if it was to do with the way New Zealand saw itself in relation to England."
That theme, of colonisation, along with the way the media seized upon the group and encouraged people to capture pictures and video of them if spotted, was what appealed to de Mallet Burgess.
"They themselves, behaving incredibly badly, also ended up being pursued by the media and the people of New Zealand. There are strands there about the way in which media and communication is going in this age of the digital and social media."
He says the term 'unruly' used for the group made him think of Hamlet and the lawless resolutes.
"There's an epic quality to the story of what happened here. The fact that people arrive with an ambition to see The Hobbit and end up running amok across the country."
The opera won't be a beat-up on the group, he stresses, instead it will show how the tourists' bad behaviour also brought out the worst in Kiwis, with people filming them and harassing them throughout their visit.
They've also brought in a consultant from the traveller community to help handle the opera sensitively toward the group.
He says NZ Opera is going through a challenging time and new works, such as this one, are a way of invigorating audiences. The company is now commissioning new works at a faster rate than they've ever done, he says.
"We love our audience who are already invested in opera and we put on mainscale productions of canonical works and concerts and recitals and things we know they love. But opera needs to find new audiences, we need to find ways of telling our own stories rather than always shoehorning an old work into a modern framework.
"The only way in which we can do that, I think, is through reimagining the art form; either the way it's presented or the work itself that we commission."
De Mallet Burgess says new generations shouldn't feel they need carry the baggage from the past 200 years into the present and instead should look at creating new works.
