The Merry Opera stages The Messiah

Transcript

00:00I'm Matthew Quirk and I sing in Mary Oprah's production of Messiah. I'm one of the bassists.

00:17There are 12 singers only in it and we've been touring it since 2011 around the country

00:23to all sorts of churches, Catholic, Church of England, Free Churches, Baptist Churches,

00:29all across England and indeed to Northern Ireland as well. 13,700 people have seen it

00:35across the country. We've done 115 performances and we tend to tour it around Christmas and

00:42around Easter each year.

00:49We had an idea to do a stage production of the Messiah. We wanted to go to venues near

00:56those theatres to widen the catchment area. So we went to churches nearby and we thought

01:03what can we do as an opera in a church?

01:15The one thing that Mary Oprah does is it tries to make every singer have just as important

01:22a role as each other and the idea with the Messiah was to give every singer the same

01:27amount to sing. The result is that when I mentioned this to the stage director, John

01:33Ramster, he looked rather worried. So we sat and talked a bit more and six weeks later

01:39he came up with a brilliant idea.

01:45Twelve singers in a church, all of whom have backstories, feeling very lonely and through

01:52singing the Messiah and through meeting the other characters and understanding that those

01:57other characters' backstories, they begin to develop some empathy and sympathy so that

02:03towards the end of the production and performance there's a much more community, much more

02:09collegiate group and a much calmer feeling. They might not have resolved all their problems

02:15but there is at least there a feeling of hope.

02:24We take this production round to churches and because the church itself is the set,

02:31the singers move around the church in every performance. Sometimes they sit with the audience,

02:38sometimes they're up at the altar, sometimes they're in the pulpit and it does mean that

02:42every performance is different because every church is different. This adds not only to

02:49the audience's perception of the Messiah where things are happening right around them,

02:53which is unusual for them, but also for the singers because you might find in one performance

02:59that a singer that you normally see in one position is in a totally different position

03:03and might actually be doing something completely different to what they did in the previous

03:07performance. So each singer has to react to that and each performance is, from the

03:12singer's point of view, very fresh and from the audience's point of view is also very

03:16fresh and we hear from the audiences, very interesting.