Britten The Rape of Lucretia Aldeburgh Festival and English National Opera, June 2001 Director David McVicar Lighting Paule Constable
The production won the South Bank Show award and was nominated for an Olivier Award for Best New Opera Production.
Reviews
... ravishingly designed by Yannis Thavoris... (Sunday Times Best of 2001)
Played out on a magnificently sculptured set-module by YannisThavoris that did exactly as the text demanded (when you heard the words ’frail crucible of light’ you also saw one, beautifully realised), this was a show of great style and substance. (Opera Now magazine)
McVicar and his designer Yannis Thavoris have placed the piece in a modern no-man’s land. Colours of earth, slate, stone and wood dominate, making the shock of the defiled Lucretia’s entrance in a bold purple gown even more disturbing. A narrow, horizontal rectangle of light forms a backdrop against which the characters appear, at times in silhouette, at others in dazzling light. ... At times, a guillotine-like screen slowly descends, shutting out the light. In the rape scene, shocking in its restraint, a glinting mirror enables us to witness the monstrous deed from front and rear. (Observer)
... impressively simple sets by Yannis Thavoris, (Sunday Telegraph)
McVicar and his designer Yannis Thavoris have very skilfully worked... to create enormous resonance. There is no extraneous detail, no attempt to evoke the classical world except in the costumes, but every stage picture, beautifully lit by Paule Constable, moves the opera forward with unblinking directness. (Guardian)
... designers Yannis Thavoris (sets and costumes) and Paule Constable (lighting) leave us where Britten wanted - in an imagined Ancient Rome, stark, dark and bronze, bleakly militaristic and segregated. (Telegraph)
Yannis Thavoris’s simple set creates a back wall that at one moment opens to suggest long vistas and at the next closes in around the drama. In the rape scene the wall becomes a mirror, doubling Lucretia’s agony while reiterating the audience’s voyeurism. (Independent)
... lighting designer Paule Constable dips shadows smooth and slow over Yannis Thavoris’s beautiful, linear set - a resinous scoop of copper and purple flowing from a looming brutalist structure of oxidised black.. (Independent on Sunday)
Thavoris’s set is a miracle of timeless stylishness and symplicity: an urn, a vase, a bowl of flowers, the odd piece of discarded armour are the only props on a contoured floor into which is dug a teardrop-shaped pit, serving as Lucretia’s bed in Act II. (Sunday Times)
Yannis Thavoris à imaginé un décor unique riche d’atmosphère: une sorte de désert dans des couleurs rouges, au sein duquel se déroule l’intégralité de l’action... (Opera International magazine)
Yannis Thavoris’s simple and effective sets are lit softly and oppressively by Paule Constable. The Choruses stray onto a slightly raised platform on which the main drama takes place. It is enclosed only by a single back wall which is replaced by a huge sloping mirror during the rape scene - as if to watch the assault from one angle were not voyeurism enough. The absent Collatinus is represented by the breastplate which Lucretia so treasures... (Opera magazine)
