A Matter of Misconduct! is your third collaboration after Told by an Idiot and In Flagrante. It’s fair to say you enjoy working together?
Emma Jenkins: We love working together. We’ve already enjoyed two collaborations, both for Opera Highlights, so this was an opportunity to refine our signature style across a wider canvas. As a team we already had a shorthand and understood each other’s process so writing this piece had an ease and joy.
Toby Hession: Neither of us is precious about our work, and we learn a lot from each other. We are always able to bounce ideas off one another. If ever I ask Emma if I can make a change – for instance, to switch two lines around, or to make a cut to sit better with the music – she tells me to just do it! But I’ll always ask!
Emma: I trust Toby to take what works from my words. He has great instincts for comedy and timing.
In Flagrante, your 15-minute opera that took aim at corrupt politicians and something of a forerunner to A Matter of Misconduct!, ended up being performed at the Scottish Parliament. Were there any surprises from its reception?
Emma: Watching it go to Holyrood was a huge surprise. It was such a fun vignette for us to write. I think we have the same sense of humour and enjoy poking fun at those in power – we had been given the brief that it should take aim at politicians. How an opera starts is so important: what’s the first punch that you throw? In Flagrante is a really condensed snapshot. We had to create an arc and go on a journey very quickly. And I’d always wanted to start an opera with the word ‘Knickers’. So I knew exactly what was going to happen.
Toby: While I never doubted the integrity of In Flagrante, I was surprised – and a little alarmed – by how much of a hit it was in the press around Opera Highlights. Almost every review mentioned it and said it was one of the best bits of the show.
Emma: In Flagrante, and now A Matter of Misconduct!, could be called sitcom opera. I think people want to be entertained. And there isn’t anything that you could really classify as sitcom opera, apart from Gilbert and Sullivan. It’s pratfalls, slapstick, and funny words. Opera can be so many things, but it hasn’t been pure fast-paced, farce entertainment for a long time. This is the niche we’re carving.
Toby: We hope this recreates what it must have been like at the first night of a piece like, say, The Barber of Seville – a load of good tunes, a risqué story, and someone in power getting into a bit of hot water.
Emma: Our work gently pokes fun at people we know – not with a bludgeon, just in a satirical, gentle way. It puts them on show and makes us laugh both with and at them.
Politics can change so fast. Has writing something current but not tied to the here and now been a challenge?
Emma: We are not making any bold statement nor are we imagining our humble operetta will change the world.
Toby: These characters can be from anywhere along the political spectrum. We conceived this in early 2024, before a UK General Election that promised, if nothing else, to tackle corruption and sleaze but by the time we had the first sing-through with the cast in December there were new people up to their necks in donor scandals.
Emma: They can't avoid it! And people don't forget.
Toby: If the people who promised to clean up politics really did so, it would make for a very boring piece on stage, so I’m annoyingly reassured. There are lots of specific references and hidden Easter eggs to find (both in the plot, and the music itself!), as well as many more general allegories.
Emma: This piece should hopefully stand the test of time. Some operas make trenchant political or social comments, but that’s not what we do. We present funny situations and then it’s up to you if you laugh, judge, or hide your head in your hands at their antics.
Opera has a political history – artists like Mozart, Donizetti, Verdi, and Gilbert and Sullivan all pushed what could be said and shown on stage. Can opera still be effective satirical entertainment?
Toby: For me this question opens a can of worms, because I don’t know how A Matter of Misconduct! sits within opera and its popular preconceptions today. My introduction to the world was through musical theatre, which is populist in the best sense. This piece is operatic in the Wagnerian sense in that it encompasses everything: singing, stagecraft, design, orchestral music, choral music, and so on. But this is not weighty or ‘serious’ satire. It doesn’t take itself seriously, and that’s possibly why it has been quite fun and (mostly!) easy to write. It blends elements of lots of my favourite musical and dramatic vehicles and art forms.
Emma: Opera is, at its heart, a great story told with music. But I would say A Matter of Misconduct! is operetta – G&S for the 21st century. There are so many ways people are redefining our wonderful art form today, and I would like to think operetta is part of the answer. It is pure entertainment: physical and verbal and fun. There are plenty of new works which explore serious and worthy topics, but our piece puts entertainment front and centre. That said, farce is a very serious business, and we have spent an awful lot of time crafting it. John Cleese describes farce as being ‘like clockwork: the writer winds it up by carefully establishing credible premises and then lets the whole thing unwind with inevitable but startling logic’. These words of wisdom from the master have been our guiding light throughout the process. All the moving parts have to be absolutely right. Then you let it run. Structure and how the arc of the narrative unfolds is paramount. Our aim is to create something that people can have as much fun watching as we have had writing it.
A Matter of Misconduct! is full of pop and historical references, puns, wordplay, and innuendo. What was your approach to the words, and how did you choose what references to include?
Emma: I don’t have a single answer to this. If it made us laugh, then we ran with it. What makes me laugh are things that are both wordy and physical – Feydeau farces, Alan Ayckbourn, Brian Rix, Fawlty Towers, and the like. And I am a great fan of Gilbert’s words; they’re incredibly clever, and I have learnt so much from studying them. I enjoy working with rhyme as well, so a lot of this libretto is in rhythm and rhyme that support patter arias and shared lines. Then it is seeing how far I can push the envelope in a fun way. There are certain words people might not have heard sung operatically before – the discussions we’ve had! Where does the downbeat sit when rhyming ‘royal highness’ and ‘vaginal dryness’?
What are key moments the audience should listen for?
Toby: The overture is full of motifs that pop up throughout the piece. When writing my first ‘big’ opera, I had to learn a few things very quickly. I realised I couldn’t work in order. I had to find the big set pieces that would take time to work through. I did, however, start at the beginning, with the overture. It’s counterintuitive – Mozart famously wrote the Don Giovanni overture right before the premiere – and sometimes these openings come together last, particularly in operetta or musicals where overtures are compilations of greatest hits. But I had to ask myself: how does the piece start? How do I immediately create this atmosphere of chaos and silliness? The rest of the piece spun out from that, even if I did have to jump around here and there. When I was stuck for material later in the process, I went back to the treasure trove I had inadvertently created, pulling out motifs I had written but not yet used. This happened in particular with the silent movie-type scene near the end.
There’s also a big Rossini style set piece about two thirds of the way through – our own Act I Barber finale, if you will. That took some time to work out and construct!
Emma: I think it’s important to build the drama towards that golden moment two thirds of the way through a piece where all the crises come to a head and all the characters’ agendas collide.
Toby: My favourite passage of music is Roger’s and Cherry’s duet, just after that climactic moment. After struggling for a while with certain sections either side of this scene, and having talked at length to Emma, I ended up writing this entire six-minute duet in about two hours. It just ‘happened’, on the first time of trying, and it is one of the few parts of the piece that hasn’t changed at all from the first draft. It turned into this beautiful little standalone vignette and taught me a real lesson about trusting my instincts. In its orchestration, expect to hear something a little reminiscent of Alan Menken…
…on the subject of which, orchestration is another new aspect for our collaboration. In Flagrante was written for piano, and I had to fill in my shorthand in places when another music director took over the tour! But here, although I wrote the vocal score first, I was constantly thinking ahead about the orchestra. I would be lying if I said there wasn’t a little (vain) voice in my head reminding me of the need to impress, what with this being my first piece on this scale. But you have to fight that voice off because, fundamentally, the job is to tell the story and do service to the words. I have, however, tried to make it fun for the orchestra to play! You want to keep your performers on side, and creating music that they are excited to play and sing is never a bad idea.
Emma: That’s the same for a chorus. I enjoy writing for a chorus and it’s important to me that we give them something they will enjoy and have fun with, where they can explore individual and ensemble roles. We write for the people who are going to make it happen.
What is fun about writing an opera centred on people – perhaps event villains – we love to hate?
Emma: It goes back to the influences we enjoy. If you take Fawlty Towers for example, none of us probably want to sit down and have dinner with Basil Fawlty.
Toby: I do , just once!
Emma: We don’t want to be best friends with these people, but we adore them because of their human frailties and their buffoonery. Sylvia is pretty sharp, but the others are just bumbling buffoons. They are inflated people that we see in politics or elsewhere in real life. And life is sometimes a lot stranger than art.
Toby: When we finally got to talk to the five singers about what we’ve created, there were some parallels that even I hadn’t quite picked up on or clocked that caught me by surprise! You’ll have to draw your own conclusions. But it goes back to the recognisability of these stories and archetypes, and the way in which we see history repeat itself. Perhaps where A Matter of Misconduct! is more unusual is that there is no victim. There’s no one you come away feeling sorry for. All of the characters are awful people, and nobody finds any redemption.
Emma: They’re all absurd and incompetent in their own different ways. There’s something in each of them that we all recognise – everyone knows somebody like that, or who has seen somebody like that, and these characters are inflated versions that the performers and audience can latch on to. But we don’t hate them. They’re very, very naughty. If anything like that happened in real life (which, of course, it does) that’s horrendous. But when it happens on stage, it’s a little bubble of unreality. You have to be able to laugh at them, and at most things in life. We feel strongly that anything can be the subject of satire. We shouldn’t be afraid, even if it treads a line from time to time.
Toby: What's the point of satire if it's safe?
You’ve written a piece about UK politics, but you have an international cast – is there appeal around the world?
Emma: Our opera deals with archetypes and universally recognisable characters. The cast are all amazing performers and they have really embraced their characters and the genre, which has been so encouraging to watch.
Toby: I’m always sceptical of pieces that are too specific. If you look at the operas that have survived the centuries, ones that don’t are often too inextricably locked to a specific time or place. It can be very hard for a future creative team to put a new spin on those pieces. The joy of G&S, for example, is its transferability across time, and hopefully (or not!) our piece will still be relevant in ten – or even a hundred – years’ time.
Emma: In all good sitcoms, you put a collection of characters in some sort of jeopardy, and you can just allow their reactions to power the story to its end. That’s what we have done. We also had the good fortune to be able to workshop the piece with the singers which is both a luxury and a necessity. It’s a wonderful moment when a new piece is heard for the first time.
Toby: The moment we heard everyone sing together, I knew what I heard in my head was not complete rubbish. I’m excited to see and hear it come together onstage, from the pit. By then, it’s not our baby anymore – I am putting on my conducting hat and solving the problems I’ve created for myself.
Interview conducted and condensed by Carmen Paddock, Publications Editor at Scottish Opera.