Testament

The moment you put something on a stage, it becomes present.

One of the things I loved about working on Testament was that the process of making the opera began to mirror what the opera itself is about.

It started with Colm’s words. Then those words became a libretto. I set them to music. The score went to singers and instrumentalists. Then a director, designers and performers began interpreting it. By the time we reached the stage, something that had begun in the imagination of one writer had passed through a large number of other imaginations.

At each stage, somebody acquires a certain amount of authority.

That wasn’t just a neat parallel I noticed afterwards. As I composed, Colm continued to work on the libretto, making tiny adjustments as needed. A line that seemed complete on the page could need more space when sung; elsewhere, the music could carry a passage further without another word being added. We were making decisions together about where the language should lead and where it should give way.

That seems particularly appropriate for a work concerned with how stories are made.

Colm’s The Testament of Mary is intensely interior. Mary is remembering. In prose, a writer can move almost imperceptibly between what is happening now, what happened decades earlier, what somebody said, what Mary thinks somebody said, and what she now believes about it.

Opera has a different problem. The moment you put something on a stage, it becomes present.

Photo Credit: Patrick Redmond and Irish National Opera. *Testament* had its world premiere at Galway International Arts Festival.

That became our opportunity.

Rather than trying to reproduce the book’s interiority, we could make memory physically happen around Mary. A person she remembers could emerge from the ensemble. A recollection could become a scene. The past could suddenly occupy the same space as the present.

I became increasingly interested in making the musical structure work in the same way.

There is no conventional separation between “the orchestra” and “the stage” in Testament. The instrumentalists are onstage and visible. They perform as part of the same world as the singers and actors. There is no visible conductor.

That means the piece depends unusually heavily on listening. Performers have to breathe together, watch one another, sense where a phrase is going and sometimes communicate through tiny physical cues. In rehearsal, I realised that this wasn’t merely a practical solution. It was part of what the opera meant.

Everybody is watching everybody else.

Everybody is listening.

Everybody is trying to work out what happens next.

The sound world extends beyond the acoustic performers. There are fixed electronic soundscapes, but these are extrapolated from the musical material of the opera itself. I think of them almost as suspensions of the score’s DNA. They allow the music to remain present even when its source becomes difficult to locate.

That was important because the opera is full of things that are present without being physically there. Jesus himself is the most obvious example. He is the person around whom everything revolves, yet our focus remains on Mary and on the people reconstructing his story.

The larger tradition behind the piece is obviously enormous. Two thousand years of Christianity have given us an extraordinarily powerful set of images of Mary: the Madonna and Child, the Pietà, the grieving mother at the foot of the Cross.

But Colm’s Mary does something startling. She refuses the serenity of those images.

She is frightened. She is angry. She has doubts. She is still in pain. For me, that makes her more rather than less moving.

Opera has always been fascinated by myth. But myth usually arrives onstage already formed. Gods are gods. Heroes are heroes. We know the story.

Testament offered the possibility of looking at an earlier and much stranger moment: the point before the story has settled.

We see people trying to decide what happened.

And, perhaps more importantly, what it should mean.

Ongoing thread. More from Tarik O'Regan to follow.

‍

Read the full thread →

Paul Moody

The Stepford Wives

When Joanna Eberhart makes the decision to try to escape Stepford, she returns home to discover that her children are missing. Wrongly believing that they are at her friend Bobby’s house, she makes her way over and resolves to test once and for all whether Bobby is human or, as she suspects, has been transformed into a subservient android. Picking up a knife, she plunges it into Bobby’s abdomen—and is horrified to discover that her worst fears are confirmed when she sees that Bobby does not bleed.

This scene, as gruesome as it sounds, stands as an ideal entry point into the film for several reasons. First, it is important that Joanna stabs Bobby where her womb would be, directly linking Joanna’s attack to the Stepford women’s lack of control over their own reproduction—a key concern of second-wave feminism and one that was pertinent to the American consciousness at that time. Oral contraception had only just become available to all women, regardless of marital status, in 1972, one year before the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision had enshrined the legal right to abortion.

The diligence with which the film connects Joanna’s own creativity with her role as a mother suggests that this attack on Bobby is also indicative of its underlying argument about the stultifying effects of suburban life on creativity. By becoming a Stepford android, Bobby has lost her ability to create—both artistically and as a mother—which ultimately is what Joanna is most afraid of.

Discussion of the scene was also an important aspect of the film’s production. The archival documents I discuss in the book reveal that this moment, which was not in the original novel, was nonetheless influenced by a letter from the author, Ira Levin, to the director, Bryan Forbes, after Levin had read Forbes’s screenplay. In the script, Bobby does in fact bleed from her wound, but Levin argued that it was important that she did not because "Joanna’s our heroine and she’s right. (Also, because a knife coming out clean is a real shocker, and Hitchcock has the patent on blood-down-the-drain)." This insight helped Forbes to refine the film’s message, also leading to the refilming of another scene in which one of the Stepford wives is injured in a car accident and, in the version as originally filmed, also bled.

But perhaps its main importance to the film is also one of the many ironies of its production—that this scene represents yet another hidden replacement of a woman. A Styrofoam body covering had been made for Bobby to wear, into which Joanna was supposed to plunge the kitchen knife—but the actress, Katharine Ross, found the notion too disturbing: "It was very hard for me to stab, even something that wasn’t real!" The scene is extremely brief, but what we actually see on screen is not Katharine Ross, but the arm of the film’s director. Forbes says that he "put her jacket on, shaved the back of my hand and did it!" The gusto with which he delivers the blow suggests that he was fully aware of the metaphor of the creative artist striking against the dulling conformity of suburbia—but perhaps not of the irony of his actions in replacing the film’s lead actress in this moment.

In many ways, this scene sums up the debates about Stepford which have occurred since its release in 1975. Does it represent a progressive message about female empowerment, or is this an example of a male attack on the 1970s women’s movement? By bursting some of the myths about the production and highlighting the unknown work of the many women involved in making it, I hope that my book contributes to this discussion in a meaningful way and enables people to view the film again in a new light.

Read the full thread →