On Behalf of a Madman
A play with opera
Devised by Julia Mintzer and written by Charles Ogilvie
“…an inventive mashup of contemporary politics and classic opera…” -The Stage
The phrase “on behalf of a madman” is a quote from Caterino Tommaso Mazzolà’s libretto for Mozart’s opera La clemenza di Tito. Based on a story by Metastasio, Tito is a study in the idealized wisdom of the Emperor Tito, told as an allegory of the newly crowned Leopold II, for whose coronation the work was commissioned. While Mozart’s opera transposes the late eighteenth century Holy Roman Emperor to ancient Rome, framing him in a heroic light, the questions explored in contemporary political dramas are rarely so flattering. A fascination with the character of our rulers, sometimes eclipsing even their actions in office, is present in both eighteenth century western Europe and contemporary America. Obsessed with personality over policy, we try to fill in the blanks in their motivation from an assortment of staged encounters and (potentially) carefully crafted soundbites, leaving plenty of room for confirmation bias to build on our emotional prejudices.
Real world political stories are played out in headlines and newsreels of pivotal moments. But when most people think about the day-to-day behind-the-scenes business of government, they are left having to build a synthesis out of fictional sources: popular tv shows, comedies, and movies like West Wing, Veep, The Daily Show, Yes Minister, and All the President’s Men. We built On Behalf of a Madman in homage to all of the above, around operatic material from the Classical and Bel canto repertoire. Episodes loosely follow a format: problem, confusion, twist. Indeed, if you think it through often the plots don’t really make much sense at all. But it creates the comedy which underpins the deeper satire at work.
The creation of On Behalf of a Madman began with Julia combing through western operas from the 18th -19th centuries, looking for texts related to the themes we were exploring, based on the original 2017 commission from historical orchestra Grand Harmonie to devise a piece about Fake News. Julia grouped the arias by their voice parts, defining a new set of composite characters. We fantasized about how these characters would interact, and crafted a story line out of these dynamics. Generously supported by a fellowship from the Bogliasco Foundation in Genoa, Charles wrote the dialogue around the key musical numbers, and Julia then embellished with more musical excerpts, some complete, some in fragments, co-opting arias as underscore, re-voicing some for different vocal ensembles, intertwining fragments from different operas, eventually loosely adapting the formal archaic Italian libretti into vernacular English.
We have tried to play with the expectations attached to the different pacing of stage, television and opera, moving between the three different genres, as between different time periods and styles of musical material. We wanted to find ways of playing off the formal qualities of all our material, for example, the comic timing of da Ponte opera vs contemporary political sitcom, or between the pathos of 1980s film drama vs bel canto opera. These conversations, each subordinated to the same end, point to the universality of the critique of power and of those who hold it. We hope the result feels something like a contemporary answer to Monteverdi’s La coronazione di Poppea: any character could be either completely sociopathic, or doing what seems like the only right thing to do within the specific moral framework in which they operate.
We edited the piece for this production, and we write these notes now, not knowing what the world will look like when we wake up on 4 November. Since the genesis of this project, politics in the real world have evolved dramatically, and sometimes we’ve asked ourselves if it’s still ok to laugh. In drawing our pastiche together across centuries, during which far greater minds have wrestled with such similar questions, our conclusion is that we need to laugh more than ever.
By Charles Ogilvie and Julia Mintzer
