“My job now is to make work, to tell stories,” Hunter said.
But the director is not complacent about working in an area which usually escapes public attention. It is her mission to broaden both the world of opera and the public perception of it.
Armed with these insights I went back to the piece and now the figure of Phaedra, alone in a vast space of darkness, her story told in a frenetic monologue, a self divided to the point of hallucinations and hysteria, whose only way to “purity” is in death, took on even more fascinating dimensions, with the Beckett/Racine dialogue strikingly relevant.
‘To direct, you have to lead and that’s the challenge,’ she says. ‘You’re leading a gang, a family. In Paris, the directing bug got me and the minute I realised I had the ability to inspire other people, I could never let it go.’
“It seemed to encapsulate everything I’d been speaking about,” says Sophie of the design. “It feels very much of nature, and it’s so detailed and extraordinary that I’m still trying to get my head around how beautiful it is.”
‘I’d be lying,’ says Hunter, ‘if I didn’t say that doing a show at the Barbican can affect one’s courage. But I’m hoping that if we fail, we fail gloriously. It would be terrible if it was a polite piece of theatre.’
'I don’t think I’m a pretty actress.
That’s not a category that I feel I fall into.’ So how come she started modelling at one point? She looks a little uncomfortable. 'Oh, that was 12 years ago,’ she shrugs. 'I worked with a photographer called Michael Roberts and that was it.’
The first day on set, her jaw dropped as she was led to her own trailer, parked alongside those of Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and Jim Broadbent. 'I just laughed. It was huge - bigger than my entire flat in Paris. I lapped it up.’
Lo que sí tengo claro es que estoy constantemente tratando de ir un poco más allá, de romper los límites que existen. Soy muy curiosa y me gusta mucho investigar.
-Dirigió teatro y ahora ópera. ¿qué diferencias encuentra entre ambos?
-Esa relación está en el centro, para mí es una parte de una imagen mucho más grande. La música es más importante que lo que hago yo. Lo que intentamos es juntar todo, como en una simbiosis. Ese diálogo y empatía está sostenido por la música.
They are eco marvels but they are fast disappearing. Sophie Hunter explains why she is using film, music, a few tonnes
of salt and a reimagined wife of Lot to sound the alarm
Hunter started to muse on the notion of Lot’s wife, the figure in Genesis who was turned to a pillar of salt when she looked back at Sodom as she fled with her family. Rather than a “punitive” experience, Hunter wondered if the story could evoke an “act of bearing witness, of testimony”.