Mapping Out the Stage
Posted by Philipp Brieler on 4/17/20084 days to the Fille premiere!
La Fille du Régiment features a very unusual set design. The mountain landscape in which Marie and Tonio meet is made of giant folded maps. It’s an idea taken directly from the story, set designer Chantal Thomas explains. “Fille is a comedy, but it’s also a story of war,” she says during a rehearsal break. “The military were the first to make maps, so it seemed like a good idea for the visual concept of the show. And I like the contrast between the huge maps and the human scale of the characters. I think it gives a story a new perspective.” Donizetti and his librettists originally envisioned the opera to take place in the early 1800s, but the Met version is set during World War I. “The Napoleonic Wars are very far away for us today,” Thomas remarks. “There a few direct references to the period in the libretto, it’s not that important. So we decided to move the setting to another period that would feel closer to us but still be removed enough to work within the context of a comedy. The important thing we were going for was a kind of abstract ‘soldier look’.”
Thomas and director Laurent Pelly found most of the maps used in the set in an Army Museum. “We scanned them and made a few improvements to various details, especially names,” she explains. “Then we had large printouts made that were fitted to frames. It was all built pretty quickly.” For the Met stage, a few adjustments were made. The “mountains” in the background are higher than in London and Vienna (where the production was previously seen). “The auditorium of the Met is flatter and has different sightlines,” Thomas says. “There are more people sitting downstairs, so we thought it would make sense to make our mountains a little bigger.”