10 days to the Hansel premiere!

Interview with Alice Coote (Hansel)—Part II

In Richard Jones’s production, the three acts of Hansel and Gretel are set in three different kitchens. What may sound surprising at first is actually the result of a very simple idea. “The focus of the whole piece really is food,” explains Alice Coote. “The lack of it. You can call it food, you can call it sustenance, it can be taken on any level. But we all, as human beings in the world, recognize that you can have a lot of something, especially nowadays, and you still feel empty. And you can also have very little: in a huge part of the world you have absolutely no food. That’s the point of the piece, it’s not getting what you need. In this case it is food.” In the very first scene, Hansel complains that he’s hungry. By the end of the opera, things have changed: “I won’t give too much away,” Coote continues, “but by the end of the piece there’s an absolute abundance of food. But still that doesn’t solve what we need as human beings, and that is love. It’s a very deep piece.”

Within this dramatic framework, how does Coote see her character? “Hansel is a bit of an odd character to play,” the mezzo-soprano says. “I don’t have any emotional expression in it, I don’t have an aria, I don’t have a moment where I can tell the audience who I am. But it’s clear from the music. And Richard has layered [the role] with so much more to make it a real person. You know, I’ve walked past some of the schools that are behind the Met and I think I’ve seen who Hansel is. I think he’s out there, leaping around in his Nike trainers. I see him very much as an ordinary boy. He’s not a sugary-sweet figure at all, he’s ultra-ultra real—warts and all. And hopefully the audience will see that. I want him to be just a human being.” For Coote, this approach is not limited to a specific role: “What I always try to do in my job is to create a reality of a person. Of course that reality is dependent on the surroundings. You are the product of your life, your circumstances, your mother, your genes, and I am, in this production, the subject of the genes of Rosalind Plowright and Alan Held (laughs) [who play her parents]. I’m stuck in this world, but I very much hope that, as Hansel, I’m a human being rather than just a projection of ideas. That’s what I strive to create.”

This entry was posted by Philipp Brieler on Friday, December 14th, 2007 at 7:23 am and is filed under New Production Countdown. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.