Terry Hands

 

I thought I had recognised a new income stream in my early years of agenting. Why not bring prominent stage directors into Opera? No one else was doing it. The standard of opera production in those days in the UK was rather uninspiring in the main. People such as John Copley, Michael Geliot and others were not to be compared with Strehler, Visconti or Wieland Wagner. We did have first rate and even great theatre and cinema directors.

My first foray in this direction was to tempt Terry Hands into the opera house. At that time, Terry was at the height of  his career. He was co-director of the Royal Shakespeare Company with Trevor Nunn and had been the first British director to work at the Comedie Francaise. I was enormously impressed by his cycle of Shakespeare's history plays at the Aldwych. 

I no longer remember how it happened but this operatic career took off like a rocket with 'Otello' for the Paris Opera to be conducted by Georg Solti with Placido Domingo singing his second Otello following his debut in the role in Hamburg.

This was an excellent start. Everything went well. Terry's production was admired for the way in which he composed the tableaux after Venetian painters such as Veronese. 

Moving fast to capitalize on this success I caught the interest of Christoph von Dohnanyi who was GMD at Frankfurt in those days. Dohnanyi wanted to see a production by Terry. One was playing at Stratford so I drove Dohnanyi there in my Citroen DS Safari and back to London after the performance. Dohnanyi was impressed enough to make the offer, again for 'Otello.' Terry would have accepted. He said he would do a different production from Paris.

At that moment Covent Garden came on the line to say Solti had requested Terry for 'Parsifal' which was in exactly the sae period as Frankfurt. Of course Terry preferred to do a different opera and collaborate with Solti again. He asked me who he should have as his designer. I suggested Abd'elkader Farrah with whom he had worked before and who was a highly regarded colleague at the RSC, having worked also with Peter Brook, Michel Saint-Denis and Peter Hall. What could go wrong?

The answer is that Farrah's design was covered in 'fun fur' to create a mossy feeling on the trunks and branches of a forest. It was discovered during rehearsals that this absorbed the sound of stage and pit alike so bit by bit the fur was stripped away weakening the desired effect. Also it has to be said the transformation scene was underwhelming.

Before the premiere Terry gave an interview to The Guardian in which he was asked 'Which Wagner production had influenced him most?' Unfortunately Terry answered truthfully that he had never seen an opera by Wagner before. That was it. The critic was given license to trash the production and Terry with it.

During the run there was a strike of scene-shifters so one of the performances was given without the sets. Strangely enough this didn't matter much and indeed one was able to concentrate on the 'Personenregie' which was excellent.

Poor Terry never recovered. His career went downhill and after directing the musical 'Poppy' a meeting of the board of the RSC was said to have been convened in which it was moved that Terry should never be allowed to direct a musical again. Apparently one wag added 'or Shakespeare.'

For the next 17 years Terry was the highly successful director of the Teatr Clywd which he made into a sort of Welsh National Theatre. Sometime later having lost contact with him over these years I received a call from him just to say hello and talk a bit about our relationship in the 1970s. When he died soon after I realised this was a sort of farewell to me personally. It was very touching.