We sat down for a quick chat with Polly Graham, Artistic Director, and Emily Gottlieb, , Executive Director of Longborough Festival Opera. Longborough Festival Opera is a destination summer festival nestled in the heart of the Cotswolds, with full-scale productions taking place every summer. This year’s festival runs from 30 May to 8 August, and features three new productions and one revival. Longborough is the only opera house in the world that used to be a chicken shed, having undergone an extraordinary journey from its humble origins in the 1990s to its position today as the UK home of Wagnerian drama.
What makes the atmosphere at Longborough Festival Opera feel distinct from larger
opera houses?
PG: Our theatre is often described as intimate, this is because its design allows audiences to be very close to the performers, with the pit tucked away underneath the floor of the stage. I also think of it as a confrontational and dramatic space which involves every member of the audience in the action.
EG: It’s a space imbued with the sense of family and joint endeavour. Audiences don’t just feel like they are spectating, they feel they are participating in a shared cultural endeavour. There is no front curtain, barely any wing space. Artist and audience share the space in the most raw and sometimes unnerving of ways. Being on the grounds of the family home, with chickens wandering around during performances, you really do get the sense of being invited into a special space.
Longborough has built a reputation for bold productions, including the recent Ring Cycle. How do you foster an environment where artists feel able to take
creative risks?
PG: We have physical limits to our theatre and financial limits to our budgets. Both
things force artists to make bold and incisive choices in terms of representation and
dramatic action. Our stage doesn’t serve realism, and encourages playful
deconstruction, which yields exciting results. We support Emerging Artists with
mentoring, coaching and continued professional development. We often work with
more experienced artists as they make a role début – perhaps it’s a role they want to
commit to their repertoire and sing in bigger theatres – Longborough is a great place
to try out a taxing role, because the theatre is intimate. We are very proud of our
track record of developing British Wagnerians, and our Music Director, Anthony
Negus, who coaches and works closely with singers, has been instrumental in this.
EG: Longborough is a place built on risk-taking, from the first spade in the ground,
and I think that in itself fosters a great sense of ‘anything is possible’. In many ways
the lack of resources that some larger companies have enable us to be more flexible
and fleet of foot and therefore more capable of saying ‘what if’ and ‘let’s try this’. We
have a fantastic team all of whom are immensely creative and curious, and I think
that vibe comes off on the people we work with!
Polly, you’ve spoken about the thrill of bringing together creative teams. What draws
you to particular directors, conductors or singers when planning a programme?
PG: It’s so gratifying to introduce artists to each other and then discover that a great
collaborative friendship has blossomed; or to turn up at a white card model presentation and see exciting fruits of a creative dialogue. It’s just one of the loveliest
parts of my job.
As a director myself, I am always looking for other artists with whom I can have an interesting conversation, about books, art, film and theatre – I am looking for a shared foundation or excitement in an approach to the challenges of any piece, as a starting point for a continued conversation.
Emily, from an executive perspective, how do you support ambitious artistic choices
while ensuring the festival remains sustainable and accessible?
Sustainability and accessebility are non-negotiables, and our productions are based around these values from the outset. We have to work within our means, and budgeting and financial controls are an important restraint on our creative teams- however that shouldn’t and doesn’t mean a restraint on ideas and on creativity. Fundraising, membership and ticket sales make up a vital source of the income we need to be able to mount our productions so we are always weighing up ticket and membership prices and trying to give as many access points for audiences as possible, for example our 18-35 scheme which offers subsidised tickets for our productions.
As Artistic Director and Executive Director, how do your roles complement one another during the planning and delivery of a season?
PG: We work very closely together, and discuss decisions at each stage – their financial impact, their strategic impact. Emily’s background is in stage management and that is just wonderful, because she understands everything from the starting point of the rehearsal room.
EG: We both come at this job from a love of theatre and making magic happen. Our perspectives on this are from different angles but do not tend to collide with one another. I support Polly’s exceptional artistic vision and believe that it is my job both to encourage her to be as creative as she can be with her choices and her work, as well as to keep her aware of the myriad of other considerations there are in mounting a full year of productions and education work. But Polly knows all this, and because she is someone who has been immersed in the theatre from a young age, is highly adaptable when one needs to pivot direction for reasons of strategy, or budgets, or both.
What felt especially important to include in this season at this moment in the
company’s evolution?
PG: Sellable operas by composers people know and love and will buy tickets for,
interpreted for our times by excellent performers and creative teams.
EG: Work by exceptional composers giving a breadth of work for our audience to experience, top quality artists as well as fantastic emerging artists, another Shakespeare title as we celebrate our position in the country only 25 minutes from the poet’s birthplace, four fabulous women directors and a gender balance of conductors to ensure that diversity and inclusion remain at the heart of our planning, and so much more. It’s a very exciting season.
Looking ahead, what excites you most about the future of the festival?
PG: There is so much potential to continue to grow our reputation as an adventurous
and unmissable festival.
EG: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in 2027 will be the centrepiece of next year’s
festival, but I am equally excited about presenting Otto Nicolai’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, another Shakespeare-inspired title, and conducted by our new Music
Director, Christopher Ward. We celebrate the 30th anniversary of the festival next year too so it will be a year of celebration of our past, of looking to the future and of cementing our wonderful legacy as an organisation very much at the heart of the
opera landscape.