Noah Wyle on hit hospital drama The Pitt

You're listening to Front Row with me, Samira Ahmed.

Hello, tonight. The Doctor will see you now. ER star Noah Wiley on returning to the world of emergency medicine in his award-winning drama The Pit. Also tonight. Mm. We celebrate the music of John Dowland with Count Tenor Yestin Davies and Lutinist Elizabeth Kenny. Does opera really need to try harder to be relevant? And as the English devolution bill adds a requirement for local authorities to protect cultural provision, what will this actually mean?

Noah Wiley first achieved stardom as Dr. Carter, one of the new young medics in the 1990s smash-hit hospital drama ER, alongside George Clooney. Now, three decades later, Wiley's reunited with the executive producer of that series, John Wells, to create a fascinating new TV drama, The Pit, about another A and E department. The pit is the nickname for the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Centre, and he's now the senior doctor Robbie Rubinovich. Welcome to the pit. Traumas from the T. Five minutes.

Okay, copy that. Uh actually this is the most important person that you're gonna meet today. This is Dana, she's our charge nurse. She is the ringleader of our circus. Do what she says when she says it. As you can see, our house is always packed. Beds are a very precious commodity around here, so please be quick and efficient with your workup.

Each series is set over the course of a 15-hour shift, told in hour-by-hour episodes. The first series won five Emmys and a Golden Globe. And this week the pit is arriving in the UK on the new streaming platform HBO Max. The show has its origins in the COVID pandemic, as Noah Wiley explained when we met earlier today.

That's kind of where this all began. In twenty twenty, when nobody was working, myself included, I was receiving a lot of mail from first responders who were telling me that ER had been instrumental in getting them into this in the first place and they were uh

telling me that it was really difficult what they were going through. And I, you know, it was hard for me to have To be on the receiving end of that mail and no longer feel like I had any relevance in their lives anymore, that I had been so instrumental in the beginning of their careers, but I had nothing really to offer them now. So I called John Wells and I said, I think there's another story to tell here and even though you don't wanna do the old show and neither do I, uh if you ever wanna

Pen uh Jeremiah didn't have it screamed from a mountaintop. I'd volunteer to scream it'cause I think it needs to be heard. And that's really where this all began was just a desire to To recognize that there is an A D B C line now in American health care and it's covet and we are very different on the other side of it than we were before.

uh not just as as a system, but as individuals. And we we still haven't quite unpacked all of that because we all had to get back to work and show up for our families and sh for our employers. And this isn't This is a hospital show, but really it's a character study of a guy who doesn't know that he's drowning and is um

In many ways, the thesis of season one is the doctor is the patient, and the thesis of season two is doctors don't make very good patients. And now we're back to work writing season three, and the thesis will be doctors benefit from being patients. Excellent. I'm glad to know there's definitely a series three. Hey Dave, what's a good word? Fifty two in the waiting room. Then it's not even seven. We're always working a shift, by the way.

I'm a little slack today. It's the anniversary of Dr. Adamson's death. Your character Robbie, Dr. Abinovich. It's having these flashbacks to the height of the COVID pandemic, but also inevitably we watch him, we watch you, and we think back to the young doctor we saw those years ago on ER and the idea of that there's obviously a there's a sense of the same man having grown into this Yeah.

How would you describe the character that uh Robbie is now and how did you approach getting into him, having stepped away from an emergency doctor role all those years ago? He is a bit of a lone wolf, you know, he is a workaholic. He doesn't have a lot of um

friends, he doesn't have a lot of family, he doesn't have a pet, he doesn't have a plant. Uh but he's an incredibly skilled emergency room physician who has um forgotten to find some balance in his life and gotten so far out of the habit of looking for balance that he he can't see how upside down his world is really

He's surrounded by a wonderful team and of course there's this whole new generation of young doctors and then nurses, young and and older, experienced nurses. Because the whole um premise is that each episode is one hour over the course of a fifteen hour shift. There's an intensity to it, which I'm just interested in. How did you all enter that world and get into the intensity of it as a cast?

It's incredibly rewarding as a performer a and it it's a wonderful sort of narrative gimmick that we weren't the first to to to discover. See shows like Twenty Four and other shows have have realized that the aggregate tension of building one moment on top of the next can be for a viewer extremely satisfying. But for an ensemble to work that way where everything is playing out in real time

The specificity and the attention to detail to keep the continuity is very intense. If in hour three a strand of hair comes down, it stays down until the character pushes it back up in hour five or six. So each of those tiny details need to be remembered and logged. So it's painting with an extremely fine brush. We spend nine months to accomplish exactly fifteen hours of of of screen time.

And uh so you can't gain a pound, can't lose a pound, can't get a tan, can't get a tattoo, can't get a haircut. We have to look exactly the same for nine months. We have some new faces with us this morning. Good morning, good morning. Come on over. Starting with second year resident Dr. Melissa King, fresh from the VA. Everyone calls me Mel. I'm so happy to be here. Trinity Santos intern. Victoria Javadti, MS3. Whitaker, and that's four.

And of course, it's almost entirely set inside the emergency room itself with the different treatment rooms off the edge of it like spokes on a wheel. So how did that affect? the way that you act and play. I mean, was there a sense of um almost a kind of boot camp to get into understanding where everything was and how it worked in the space?

It's multi level. We we did bring the actors in for two weeks before we started filming to do sort of a condensed medical school where we ran everybody through procedures and pronunciation and where you would be in your medical career, where you would feel energetically if these things were happening to you.

And then we had to design a a very particular set where all of our our lighting is preset in the ceiling. So we don't have any flags, we don't have any C stands, we don't have any dolly track, we don't have any dolly. We are the cinematic equivalent of two turntables and a microphone. We have Two operators and a boom operator and uh all the lighting is in the ceiling which is dialed in in uh real time as we move through the space.

So in practical terms we get to the set in the morning at six o'clock or six thirty, we start to rehearse and the second we finish rehearing rehearsing we start filming. And when we film we can shoot three hundred and sixty degrees all around the set at all times. So everybody that's on that set has to be in their character, in their storyline all the time, even when the camera's not on you, because if it finds you, you have to be exactly where we need you.

So it's completely immersive for the cast as well as the audience. the show doesn't shy away from the graphic detail of medical procedures. Some of it is comic, you know, when someone's got terrible constipation and it's treated, it's quite amusing. But there is some emergency surgery where well, the one I remember is there's blood spilling all over the floor and they're cutting through ribs.

And some and they work at they have to turn a kidney manually. How did you decide what to show? And how did you work with the latest s uh prosthetics and effects to what to do it right? On a streaming channel uh obviously gives us a much broader palette of colors to play with than we used to be able to play with on a network. Um so the well in the old days, standards and practices would limit the amount of

of procedures you could show and language you could say. Uh when you're on HBO, sky's the limit. So the the it really becomes discretion and taste. Uh how much do you want to show? What's appropriate to show? And we each season plant our flag early for the viewers to let them know that this is gonna be an adult portion and um that this is gonna be analogous to being in the backseat of a squad car on a on a ride along with a

police officer or being embedded with a combat unit in in battle. You can turn your head but you can't leave. You're in this experience with these characters. There's no God's eye camera, there's no camera on a Gurney wheel. Everything is shot from either a fifty millimeter or sixty-five millimeter lens, which is comparable to the human eye, and usually always from perspective of another participant. So you are embedded in the pit and Uh for the right.

It feels like there's a a kind of moral mission with you that you wanted, as you said at the start, to make a show that reflected what had happened in American healthcare and in American society since COVID. But it's it's more than that, isn't it? I mean you've got a list of issues it feels like you wanted to address. There is there's the c family who don't have no

Express my agenda, you'll know what I'm up to. Uh Andy Warhol said art is getting away with it. And if I explain what I'm doing, the magic trick, maybe I won't get away with it. Um that's true. I I really do believe that ER, when it was at its height, provided an unbelievable public service, which is that people could go into a hospital

and a doctor could say, Well, did you watch ER the other night? Did you see that case? Well that's sort of what we're talking about here. And it would triangulate a conversation between physician and patient that made it accessible and human

And we kinda lost that. We lost that dialogue. We lost the ability to tune in and and see something on television and come away with it feeling like an objective fact, one that we could actually take to our doctor and have validated. And We're watching the ramifications of misinformation being bled into our healthcare system and affecting the way that patients

relate to their doctors in in the most detrimental way in our country right now. So this is hopefully an antidote to kind of reverse course. Isn't it always this busy? No, it it's a lot busier. There's a nursing shortage across the country. If you paid them a living wage, they'd line up to work here. Other hospitals are managing this crisis. Either step up or step aside.

There is something very touching about seeing you as the wise team leader to a generation of what in the UK we call them junior doctors. How was it walking onto the set and re-entering that world again? I don't think I will ever have an opportunity to play another character where I have so much of that character already in my muscle memory.

from having done it for so long, so many times. There are just certain procedures and certain rhythmic moves that I I found were amazingly comfortable to fall back into. Yeah. Just something like you know. suturing or cutting or we're using any of those any of those implements. I've done them so many times. Um Just the

facility of language, all of it was not first time for me. So that was really nice to be able to come back with a little wisdom and maturity, to attack the same kind of work from a different perspective. Absolutely. Your mother was a nurse. Still is. They're like Marines once and always. Um what does she think of the pitch? She's watched it. She loves it. She's very very proud. And she said stuff to you about her career which you had never heard before as a result.

That is true. Now the c the pit became a bit of a a catalyst for my mother and I to have a whole new dialogue about uh my childhood because I even though I work with all these doctors and nurses every day, I never really thought, oh Well, I guess that would apply to my mother as well, that she probably saw and did things that she never was able to talk about. And s one day she came over and just started telling me some cases that she had

remembered that were coming up for her after watching some of the episodes and I was really moved. Really moved to take a second look at my mother and have to reevaluate that this woman who showed up every day for us Helping us with our homework, taking us to practice, making dinner, had

had put a eight year old boy into a drawer that day or cut a man's leg off and carried it to pathology or lost somebody that she was trying to save really, really desperately. And to hear that she had That is part of her reality as well was um Sobry.

As you know, it's a very strange time in the US in particular right now, polarized attitudes in politics, a growing anti-science conspiracy theory, misinformation. Um we already discussed how far you're on a mission with this show. Tell me a bit about going into series three against that background.

Well, I don't think it's incidental that the show's popularity is in coming in the times in which we're living. I think the show to a large extent has become kind of a lighthouse for a lot of people to remember that there are smart, dedicated, professional, compassionate, intelligent people out there manning these posts who um

Care. Care about helping people. And you can squeeze them financially, and you can squeeze them emotionally and you can put a lot of administrative pressure on them. But at the end of the day, they're still going to help people because that's who they are. It's a really noble profession and and the people that go into it go into it with a sense of um and uh and altruism that

I I think is easily overlooked as you try to vilify this community and say, Oh, they overbill or they overdo this or that. The they pick up our broken pieces every day and they do it without thanks and they do it for very little money. and uh oftentimes at great risk to themselves, personally, professionally, mentally, spiritually. So this was a show to kind of level the scales.

Noah Wiley. All of the first season of The Pit is available to stream on HBO Max from Thursday, and episodes of season two will drop weekly. I highly recommend it.

Next weekend, London's Wigmore Hall will mark the four hundredth anniversary of the death of composer John Dowland, with three days of concert celebrating the master of the Elizabethan lute song. Darling's music had a distinctive melancholy and helped define Renaissance England before falling into obscurity up after his death. He was rediscovered in the twentieth century by Benjamin Britton.

In the studio with me is counter-tenor Yestin Davies, who performs Darland regularly, but before we talk about his impact, here is Jestin performing his favourite Darland song, In Darkness, Let Me Dwell.

Yes, in Davies, accompanied by Thomas Dunford, recorded at Wigmore Hall. We're also joined in the studio by Lutinist and interpreter of Dowland's music, Elizabeth Kenny. Welcome to you as well. Um I wanted to ask you both, maybe Elizabeth first, what would you say makes Dowland's music so enduring? I think you can hear on that recording just the depth of feeling and the personal communication of this voice arising from the depths and there's something

Incredibly powerful about the simplicity of a voice accompanied by a plucked instrument. We still have that in our culture today. Um, so that bit. hasn't changed at all. So it's sort of distant and a bit mysterious but also we know how to respond to it.

So beautifully put. Um Yastin, that song is a favourite of yours as well. And it has a hint of biography too. It's an amazing song and it's a really good example of why Dowlin's music has endured because he sort of uh use he as L Liz said, it's very personal and I think

There's something about Dowham being a true melancholic rather than just imitating the fashions of the time. He spent most of his career not in England, he spent most of his career working for the King of Denmark. Because uh he was rejected by Elizabeth I. for um we think because uh he had converted to Catholicism on a drunken night out in Paris when he was younger. But he he spent all this time away from his family in London and he sent his songs back to be published um

to to make money. And this song in particular seems to echo this sense of playing in this dark, damp cellar in the castles in uh in in Den in Denmark, which the instrumentalist had to do. And he and it's almost as if he wrote the words himself, saying, My music is so discordant when it's played through this um they had a funnel which went up like a drain pipe and the king would lift a lid and be able to hear the music and shut it off. And I think Dowlin was there down in the basement thinking

I'm the best lutinist in the world and I'm sitting with the beer barrels playing this music and it's it all sounds completely rubbish up here. So he writes in all these dissonances and um that for me is just one of the greatest songs which Elisabeth, rydych chi'n gwybod sut mae'r son o'r lŷt yn cymdeithas y cymdeithas y cymdeithas y cymdeithas y cymdeithas y cymdeithas y cymdeithas y cymdeithas.

Yes, well as Jesin said, he was he was the man. Um and he knew it, and he had a great sense of his own worth. And he's constantly writing bad things about other musicians, um, because he is the only one who plays the instrument properly and he got very angry about people making pirate versions of his loot pieces as well as

his song. So he had um quite a modern sense of what his brand was. He was like, I'm the best there is and I doubt that he was a very good colleague because that was probably quite annoying to be around. So his lack of career success It's quite a complex... thing. Um, but his music, if you're a loot player, you can spend many lifetimes immersed in it and never reach the shore. It's just so challenging and wonderful.

Uh well, I mean you might be able to answer this better than me'cause it's for the loop. But I mean suddenly the music that we have, the songs that we'll sing next weekend, they were collected over time, so they weren't written specifically at one time for to to sell. I think when he released his first uh book of songs in sixteen hundred, he'd he'd been working for fifteen, twenty years.

So some of them were written for plays, we think, some of them just written as songs to sing. Um and I mean in terms of his composition of instrumental music, do you have anything to add? Well I think there there was a great cult of because he was such a celebrity in his own time

the phrase giving lessons was quite literal. You'd go to somebody's house and they might be an amate uh amateur, aristocrat, um often a woman, and you would literally give them a lesson by writing out this piece that was your music that you'd honed that he'd honed down in the cellar or wherever he'd he'd be polishing that version and then would give it to somebody and sign his autograph.

Um so we get all these phrases like autograph score and and giving lessons from he was such an innovator in in his own time as well. It was an important part of his work. How did he become popular again? We mentioned Benjamin Britain at the very beginning. Well I mean Britain the the middle of the twentieth century, I mean it wasn't just Dowland, there's a a ton of uh basically early music that was brought back, Purcell, Handel. Um and

I I mean Britton would have captured the spirits of Dowland and reused it in some of his own music. He wrote a lacrime for um uh based on the famous Dowland lacrime, the the the flow my tears motif.

uh which is concerto with viola, which we're doing on Friday. Um the various uh Julian Bream was uh a guitarist who played um the Nocturnal I think was written for him as well. Yeah. Um so Th i I think Britain connected with these composers, especially um Purcell, but but Dowland as well, um, as a way of uh inspiration and sort of making that very English kind of uh link with the past.

Well you mentioned the English link. I mean singer guitarist Nick Drake has often been compared to Dowland. I'm interested in where you see his influence in the the sort of twentieth century onwards. I think that mixture as as Jesus says that you hear the music and very much like Nick Drake as well and you know that this is

somebody's completely real, unfiltered emotion. And yet if it was, would they put it in a really beautiful song? So there's always that kind of tension between and they wrote about that in the Elizabethan period that Uh um there's another composer who wrote can dolphful notes express unmeasured grief? You know, if I'm really, really depressed, can I write such beautiful music? You know, so is it really my my feeling? And I think Nick Drake has that that quality brilliantly.

I wondered how far Darlin's popularity is to do partly with the deceptive melodic simplicity. I I I've first encountered his music doing grade two guitar. And his songs are often arranged for very basic music exams, aren't they? he knew his audience in the sense that when he was publishing those loot books, they were designed to be played and sung by amateurs sitting around at home, much as we are in the studio, we'd all have a part.

And you could break it down to just two singers, you could have four singers, you could ha maybe have a lute, maybe not. But it's it's actually the the tunes are very, very cut catchy as it were. But then if you look at contemporaries of his such as

Uh, Thomas Campion. I think Liz might agree that the loot parts are a little bit simpler and a bit more chordal, whereas Dowland is very intricate for the loot underneath. So what you're hearing is um Uh i is really kind of genius because the tune is just making you believe this is very simple, but actually it thinks hugely complex.

Well let's hear another um song. This is um Can She Excuse My Wrongs? Such a beautiful interpretation, Yeston. Um so the new season of concerts at Wigmore Hall is being announced tomorrow. Um I'm really interested in the fact that a lot of the tickets are being given away for the under twenty five.

under sixteen she'll be able to bring an adult for free from the new from September, which you know, just opening up live classical music to a new generation. It feels that John Dowlin would would really approve Definitely. I think um it's that need to share the music that is is behind it. And in whatever context, you know, whether it is for um there's a sociability about it that I love about that ticket prize as well,'cause you bring your friends and that you can go as a solitary

person to contemplate beautiful music, but you can also go with friends and Wigmore Hall does that so well because the whole atmosphere and what you can do in the interval and the way they manage the concert experience is great for all ages. And I was also thinking, yes, and this is the first season that they'll be programming without any public funding, and I wonder what impact you think that might have.

Um, well I think John has done an extremely amazing job. It's John Gilhoole. John Gilhooli who runs the hall uh to do that and I think it gives the hall a lot of um artistic liberty and and helps sort of with their own brand. Um But uh yeah, and I was just going to add something I thought of that Dowlin's music actually was written at a time of plague when, you know, people had to spend a lot of time in their house

And so s we we can all imagine uh the quarantine kind of of the sixteen hundreds. We've we've just lived through a similar sort of thing. The idea of what do we do at home? Well we'll sit down and sing through all Dowland's songs. You know, that's he's writing for people who were uh had to be sociable in a way, i but within c confined uh confined spaces. So, um yeah, luckily we're not in that period anymore.

Um Elizabeth, tell us a bit more about what what's in the or your concert that you're performing this week. Well um I'm feeling very lucky. I get to do the lacrime and we heard Yesin singing the song Flow My Tears. There's also in a way it's um very unusual to think it's the largest scale piece that Dallin wrote, and it's for five vials and loot, so it's not that large. But it's a whole universe of um variation on this piece. So that's that's the Sunday. Thank you very much.

Well thank you to both Elizabeth Kenny and Yesin Davies who will be performing as part of the John Dalen celebratory weekend of six concerts at Wigmore Hall, which starts on Friday and you'll be able to hear Sunday's concert on the Early Music Show on Radio Three later this year.

Now over the past sixteen years we've seen regular rows over cash-strapped theatres, sorry, cash-strapped local authorities rather, trying to cut arts budgets or or over the survival of theatres and performance spaces.

Only last month, Derby Council voted to demolish its modernist assembly rooms, despite concern that this would leave the city without a key performance space. Now the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill, currently going through the House of Lords, is attempting to change that. A new clause being debated today would make culture an official responsibility for local strategic authorities for the first time. This would give mayors new powers to champion art.

heritage and the creative industries. And the amendment has been welcomed by many arts campaigners. One of them is with me now, Claire Walker from Society of London Theatre. Welcome to you. Um Good evening. Give us a sense of what this will change if this bill goes through with this clause.

So actually I think this is brilliant news and it's worth mentioning that actually this clause has also been accepted by the government, so that's really hopeful that it will actually go through into the act. So this will give the power for mayors to champion arts and culture and it will be

first time that that responsibility will be part of their official duties. So they will need to consider uh how they support art and culture in their mayor area. And that's a huge step forward for some of the reasons that you highlighted. And we should say these are part of the the bigger strategic authorities where you got a Absolutely. So it's not just a local council. Council. Absolutely. So it is those bigger those bigger areas. But they do cover quite a reasonable part of the country now.

Some of the most passionate campaigns are over buildings like theatres, you know, community buyouts. What's going to change if a local authority says it can't afford to fund them or repair them or keep them open? So for the first time they will have to consider that and they will have to think about how they balance that a against other needs for local councils. I think we all know how cash strapped some of these local areas are.

theatres and and spaces like you've described are always marginalised because they're not part of their official duties. So they will change that. But there's no doubt that these ymwneud â phoblion ymwneud â phoblion ymwneud â phoblion ymwneud â phoblion ymwneud â phoblion ymwneud â phoblion ymwneud â phoblion Well I know they're talking about extending the period from five years to ten years to give communities a chance to buy out a a venue. Will it stop local authorities this time?

yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw. Well I think there's always debates about where best the uh um individual pieces of art sit. So I'm not sure that it will give uh it will stop those individual decisions and and equally it probably won't stop the individual decisions about um many of the theatres that are owned by local authorities.

But there are many other really successful routes that are going and you see across the country of of theatres working in partnership with local authorities and coming up with really exciting community models to support them. A Soho Waltham store is a really great example where the communities work together. So there are different Rydyn ni'n ymwneud â ni'n ymwneud â ni'n ymwneud â ni'n ymwneud â ni'n ymwneud â ni'n ymwneud â ni'n ymwneud â ni.

Exactly. And so there are lots of those examples across the country where where theatres and and communities a and local authorities are coming Yn ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud.

Um, there is still an issue which keeps coming back, which is if councils are really cash strapped and they're having to choose with their budgets between, say, social services provision and culture, what difference can this bill really make about some of those hard financial decisions? So we need to make the case for culture i in the UK, we need to make the case for arts, we need to make sure that there is more funding for local authorities to deliver this and m local mayor um areas.

But I don't think it's a zero sum game. Many, many of our members, and I'm also a CEO of UK Theatre as well as the Society of London Theatre, are pr providing really brilliant programmes that also support some of those things, a dementia clinic.

um warm hubs and all of those kind of outreach and children's programmes that we really um support. So many of our members are working alongside local authorities all the time and it shouldn't just be a choice. We know that going to g arts and culture and theatre really improves mental health and really improves

ac yn ymwneud â phobl sy'n ymwneud â phobl sy'n ymwneud â phobl sy'n ymwneud â phobl sy'n ymwneud â phobl sy'n ymwneud â phobl sy'n ymwneud â phobl sy'n ymwneud â phobl sy'n ymwneud â phobl sy'n ymwneud â phobl. So it's a statement of intent and it matters in that sense? Exactly not.

Claire Walker, thank you, and we'll follow what happens to the bill, of course. Now, if you have been listening to Front Row regularly over the years, you will know a perennial accusation thrown at Opera is that it is archaic and therefore fails to connect with younger audiences. Which would have come as a surprise to Philip Glass when he wrote Nixon in China in nineteen eighty seven.

And it it would of course have come as a huge surprise to Philip Glass because he didn't write Nixon in China, it was John Adams, for which I do apologise. A groundbreaking work that dealt head-on with modern geopolitics and quickly became regarded as a classic. That was the New York Mets production in twenty eleven. But still the charge comes that opera houses rely on a portfolio of old familiar favorites.

And the latest is from a more surprising figure, no, not actor Timothy Chalamet, rather John Berry, the former creative director of English National Opera, who's thrown down a challenge to the opera world in a recent interview, and he joins us on the line. yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw Well look, I think we all strive to h work harder and you don't go into the opera business for a quiet life. But I think we're all interested in experiencing um great stories through

um film, television, music and dance. And what is really extraordinarily powerful about opera is that uniquely

it uniquely elevates storytelling by bringing together all of these dip um all of these disciplines. But the point Is this why do some contemporary operas by living composers result in multiple performances around the world and end up being part of the regular repertoire alongside Puccini and Verdi and other works disappear quickly after their first outing, as you've just said, the success of Nixon and China, Opera's Dead Man Walking, written on skin, flight, and grief.

These operas were all pretty much instant successes with multiple performances followed following their premiers. And it's interesting that the writers of these operas mostly came from diverse backgrounds. Um April DeAngeles, a playwright and screenplaywriter. Alice Goodman wrote Nixon in China, a poet, and Stephen Burkoff an actor and director um created um Mark Anthony Turnich's um Greek.

So in my experience composers are always searching for stories and in the UK we have an incredible group of theatre and TV writers who have created works such as Adolescence and Succession. And um how can we really encourage writers such as Lucy Preble and Georgia Pritchett to come into opera and create these stories with us?

Why do you think that they are not coming into opera? I mean obviously as we've pointed out there are people like uh Lee Hall who wrote Feston, you know I could give you a list of operas about interesting contemporary subjects that that you haven't already listed. So why some of these writers do you think not

Well well I think first of all the writers have to be um musical and have got to really be intrigued by the artform. And they also need to realise that unlike writing a play, which is in many ways quite a sole world in terms of writing a new play for the stage, Um coming into opera you have to work very closely with the composer and ultimately the human voice is where the real drama lies. Mark Ravenhill, playwright and director, you're also with us. What do you make of of John's idea.

Absolutely, I think it's I think it's what we're all aiming for and uh but things are very silo. John's absolutely right. We've got all these different pools of talent in this country. But w they don't tend to cross over. I mean I'm in rehearsal at the moment for an opera and I've just done a shout out on social media and said any young theatre makers who are c who've never worked in opera

Yeah, it's not yeah, it's by Ricard Strauss, but I'm d I' I I I'm directing. So I've made sure that in every single rehearsal I've got a young theatre maker. Because I think opera sounds like a mysterious other world. So I think even just something as simple as saying Come in and watch rehearsals if you're a young playwright, a young director, a young designer, whatever. Little things like that, just so the two worlds meet and and the silos start to open up a little bit.

taking an traditional opera and then turning it into a modern setting. It's not the same as new stories, which I guess is what John is hinting at. Yeah, no, absolutely. Um n news stories are very important and I think I think the um I think playwrights that maybe than John thinks are used to collaboration. I mean uh i i during the course of your career, I speak of myself as well, there are some very s pieces that come straight from you and you set alone and write them.

But we're all used to working closely with directors. Often I've written for musicals and that's a very collaborative process. Most writers half the time are also writing for television shows, they're on the team for succession or whatever. And that's a very collaborative playwright uh c collaborative job. So I think many playwrights have huge skills in collaboration and would welcome the collaboration with the composer.

John, how far is there also a problem about the music composed for modern operas rather than the stories? Well I think one of the challenges with contemporary operas is that we can end up with two extremes. We can veer from dense, incomprehensible Text and words, or we hear a musical score, which is more of a musical quasi-film score ska soundscape.

rather than pr b delivering big powerful solo arias and ensembles. And w we have to somewhere land in the in the middle. A piece I'm producing at the moment the Galloping Cure by Missy. Yeah. Um well it's an allegory um for an addiction crisis. Opioid crisis, which has become a worldwide epidemic. And it's interesting talking to Mark. The creative process for this.

um opera was quite similar, maybe in a writing room for a television um series or a film. The st we had a story maker, Karen Russell, we have a librettist, we have the director, Tom Morris and the composer and they've all worked together to create this um story. So it can be a collaborative process as as um Mark has just said, and it can be an incredibly rewarding process. And w when I watch a series like um Succession, for example, I'm amazed how few words there are.

how succinct the storytelling is and the text. Interesting. And maybe that's a lesson for us all that less is more when we're creating options.

Mark, uh Richard Morrison, the chief culture writer at the Times, has said that he doesn't ac rydyn ni'n meddwl, mae'r cyhoeddus yn ymwneudol, mae'r cyhoeddus yn ymwneudol, mae'r cyhoeddus yn ymwneudol, mae'r cyhoeddus yn ymwneudol, mae'r cyhoeddus yn ymwneudol, mae'r cyhoeddus yn ymwneudol.

I think some of those pieces that John's talking about that are played all over the world, I mean you're talking about large theatres with large ticket prices. There actually is money to be to be made by the makers of art press. There's only a handful that really go that that worldwide. But I think the idea that it's it's gonna leave you necessarily impoverished if you write a new opera is not necessarily true.

Is is that the case, John? Because I mean ticket prices are one thing. A lot of that has to do with the running of the opera house and the cost of the production, isn't it? Well, in terms of writers, it i th they can't earn the same money as they would do for a screenplay. Um um writing a screenplay for Netflix. But is it opera in incredibly rewarding world.

to work in. And, you know, I I'm thinking about the great experiences that I would challenge any skeptic in opera to go to John Adams' um Doctor Atomic about Oppenheimer and hear the setting of John Dunn's poetry um bat at my heart with Jerry Finley singing that. The experiences and particular of opera in English can be um incredibly invigorating and this is what we all This is what we're all striving for. We want to reach out to new audiences but we want to

provide work and create work that audiences can really relate to and and for them to be really excited about the story. And nothing um I'm sure Missy Mizzoli, who's written Galloping Cure, won't um um thank me for this, but when we planned several collaborators who are going to take this piece over a five year period, whilst Missy Mazzoli as a composer was a huge draw, the actual

is what got their attention. And the result of that is that we have several opera houses putting money into the production and already planning this opera well into two thousand and thirty. Interesting. Um, Mark, Timothy Chalamet did upset people for saying opera isn't central to cultural life anymore, and he was comparing it with cinema and his fear for cinema.

And I I just wonder if you feel that you're always fighting a battle to make people step into the room where opera's taking place. Once you get them in, maybe you're not worried, but it's getting them in. Um Yeah, I I guess. I mean I I find Opera so exciting. I mean I discovered it as an adult. I discovered it when I worked front of house at the English National Opera and I could not believe what I was seeing. It was just so extraordinary.

Yeah, so you always want more people to come, but I think opera's g can have a bit of a crisis about itself and be worried about whether it's any good or it's any rel I was just about to swear. It's fantastic it's fine. So yeah, we just need to share that excitement and trust that it is exciting.

Uh we'll have to leave it there sadly, but John Berry, Mark Ravenhill, thank you both. Mark is directing Salome by Ricard Strauss at York Hall in London. It opens on April the eleventh and the Galloping Cure premieres at the Edinburgh International Festival on August the ninth.

On tomorrow's programme, The Return of the High Life, the cult sitcom about cabin crews becoming a musical at the National Theatre of Scotland, and a new exhibition looks at aging in art. Do join Kirsty on tomorrow night's front row at seven fifteen. Thanks for listening to Front Row. I'm Samira Ahmed and the producer was Oliver Jones. The production coordinator was Lizzie Harris and our studio manager was Emma Hart.

You can discover lots more radio, including things like the Kenny Everett interview from nineteen seventy six on Radio Merseyside, all on BB.