Interviews with Soprano Roan Shankaruk and Director Chris Lam

Answers from Director Chris Lam

1. What interested you most about directing this new opera and bringing The Fox to the stage for the first time?

Forming new collaborations and putting my signature on this new adaptation. I remember watching a film version from the late 60’s that was introduced in the documentary, The Celluloid Closet. The score is full of complex musical lines and there is an air of mystery to these characters and their relationships.

2. The story is set on an isolated poultry farm. How do you approach staging such an intimate and psychologically complex setting?

Roan’s adaptation is faithful to the Lawrence’s prose, and there is much time spent on the inner life of the characters. The physical production lives more in the psychological space of the character’s inner lives. I’m playing more with the tension of elements of realism and poetic space—giving us more freedom to explore the claustrophobia of this triangle.

3. The opera explores power dynamics and sexuality between the characters. How did you guide the performers in portraying those tensions on stage?

This story deals with the power of desire. How desire like an inexplicable force starts to work on the characters of March and Henry. For the singers, I’ve been guiding towards maintaining the sense of restraint in the moments of attraction, in fact, that tension becomes a very powerful conflict to portray. 

4. What makes this production unique for audiences attending the premiere at The Annex Theatre?

This production is supported by a three-piece orchestra and our stagecraft, costumes, and props are anchoring the piece in the period, but the storytelling is more imaginative which will give fans of the novella a unique and different experience for our world premiere.

Answers from Soprano Roan Shankaruk’s

1. What first drew you to D.H. Lawrence’s novella The Fox and made you want to adapt it into an opera?

D. H. Lawrence has incredibly beautiful, descriptive prose, which is so musical on the page alone that I felt compelled to lift it up even more with instruments. When I first read The Fox I could immediately imagine it on stage as a piece of theatre, which is to me the first sign that I have found my next story to adapt. The isolated, intimate plot and few characters telling this fraught drama was the perfect set up for an intense chamber opera.

2. Opera often tells grand historical stories. Why do you think The Fox—with its psychological tension and exploration of sexuality—works so well as a contemporary chamber opera?

My favourite chamber operas are intense, small dramas. Lots of back-and-forth dialogue, and characters who are passionate enough to cry, scheme, and kill for intense, but small reasons. In short, the kind of stories that play out in real life every day, to average people. The fact that The Fox only has three characters and a futile interpersonal plot is why it becomes so heated. Grand opera can take its time, and its characters usually appear noble, fighting for grand ideals. Modern Chamber Opera shows people wrestling with gritty real-life problems. This is why sexuality is such a striking element in The Fox. These characters are complex, and not particularly heroic. Like real people, even modern people not constrained by the social norms of World War 1, their relationships are messy, and their feelings indefinable.

How many modern LGBTQ youth deny labels and strive to avoid being put in boxes, whether of gender or sexuality? They live lives not unsimilar to the characters in The Fox, March, Henry and Banford. These characters pursue romance in all directions depending solely on where their feelings take them rather than defaulting to heteronormativity. They express themselves in masculine or feminine clothes and personas depending on the day. Yet, they nonetheless feel trapped and compelled by their notions of the outside world and what it expects of them, no matter how hard they try to fight against it.

3. How did you translate the intense emotional relationships between the three characters into music?

Party why I was inspired to adapt D. H. Lawrence’s story is that the novella is filled with very specific descriptions of each character’s voice. March is low and slow, Banford higher and nervous, and Henry rapid and usually whispered. Due to these different extremes, their voices are suited for harmony. Musical conversation written in spoken rhythms flowed easily, and I was even able to bring their internal monologues out, overlapping, into dream-like trios and duets. However, these characters also say a lot of things that they don’t mean, they mock each other, and make romantic gestures that conflict with their ideals. The instrumental ensemble is there to not only provide the voice of nature and of the woods which surround the farm, but also to express each character’s secret thoughts and motivations. Using specific motifs and recalling past musical themes, they can express in music what these characters cannot even sing aloud.

4. What do you hope audiences in Vancouver take away after experiencing the world premiere of The Fox?

My first goal with any piece of theatre, is to entertain. To have an audience enjoy their experience and leave feeling satisfied, moved, and perhaps, if they’re another artist like me, inspired to create something new of their own. I want the audiences of The Fox to feel that they have crept into a different world, hidden in the shadows of the forest and looking through the trees at this isolated, frosty drama.
Of course, I would also love them to enjoy the music, and to feel compelled enough by it, that through it they can understand all the inner workings of the story. To not see these characters in black and white, but to look at people from one hundred years ago as just as flawed and courageous as people today.

For tickets and information, visit: operaunbound.com

Opera Unbound (operaunbound.com)

Pushing the boundaries of opera creation. Opera Unbound creates unique artistic experiences grounded in collaboration across genres and mediums. We aim to make opera immediate, welcoming, and relevant. We partner with artists across Greater Vancouver to develop and present new collaborations, from workshops and house concerts to full-scale premieres.

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