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La Traviata

Our next project is to make a film of La Traviata. We have chosen one of the repertoire’s most famous and best loved works because it has wonderful, accessible, music and a simple, moving, love story. We want to take it out of the great opera houses and bring it into a new light. This is not live capture, but a new approach to delivering opera in a different way.

We are going to reimagine Verdi’s opera, originally designed for a large romantic orchestra and huge chorus, as an intimate love story. There will be a chorus, and dancers, and an orchestra, but we want to get to the bare bones of this remarkable tale. Developing the relationship between singer and camera that we discovered on The Turn of the Screw, we will draw the audience into the heart of the piece. Exploring its emotional canvas in this way we will still honour the wonderful, heightened, theatrical world in which Violetta and Alfredo and Germont play out their drama.

The Turn of the Screw was not shot in an Edwardian country house but we created a world of ghosts, Suffolk reed beds and decaying English schoolrooms. So, this is not naturalism, our La Traviata is not exactly set in 19th century Paris: we will be shooting in a wonderful location in the English countryside and an exciting venue in London.

Tom Piper will again be designing our set and Rosalind Ebbutt our costumes. Richard Hetherington will be conducting and we will be joined by Etta Murfitt as choreographer. We will be directing and producing.

“How quaint the complaints about HD cameras at live-broadcast performances from the Met or Covent Garden seem now. Here the camera becomes a confidant and an interrogator, good cop and bad cop, in an opera in which no one tells the whole truth.”

Times Literary Supplement


We can now announce our cast, which will include:

Susana Gaspar
Violetta
Thomas Elwin Alfredo
Roderick Williams Germont

This will be Roderick’s role debut as Germont