As the quintessential opera queen, a donnish Daniel Somerville embraces the persona of legendary Australian coloratura soprano, Joan Sutherland—the loftiest of lofty opera divas. From a South London bedsit, he transcends the mundane to enter into the glorious and passionate heaven of opera.
In Admiring La Stupenda, Somerville lovingly inhabits the persona of the opera queen—an easily recognised figure from the overlapping milieu of the gay and operatic worlds. Theirs' is a rich tradition which significantly predates the emergence of modern gay consciousness. Once found in the shadowy wings, they now visibly and indispensably, inhabit the world of this most culturally complete of artforms.
Somerville’s devotion to Sutherland—La Stupenda—is just as complete. “There is something about her strength and agility; her total investment in her vocal art... I just love those high notes. I’m an opera queen; what can I say. I am transported listening to her—the voice travels through me, penetrates me, activates me.”
Operatic movements
With a performance-academic's knowledge of the movement patterns of opera singers (his thesis), Somerville expertly recreates Sutherland's stagecraft.
There are reasons for the opera singer's studied movements. The mechanical imperatives of opera singing require singers to move within range-limiting constraints. They need to protect their “instrument”—their vocal cords and throat. This means keeping their breathing passages open. And even when exercising dazzling vocal dexterity, there are other factors to consider. “They're thinking about the character, the situation of the narrative; and how this relates to the conductor”, says Somerville. “They are considering, always where they are in their state-of-being within a performance.”
Opera singers also tend to embody the flow of music through their movements. However, “when a singer carves the arc of the music … with their hand for example... some directors won’t like that, because it’s too ‘operatic’, and [they] want something a bit more realistic...”
But try as they might, the opera singer’s body, when expressing itself vocally, needs to move and expand. The “music emanates from them and courses through them.. and it’s almost irresistible... And, before you know it, up goes the arms.”
From the toolbox of Japanese Butoh theatre, Somerville expresses with mimetic gestures, the wild emotional fluctuations of Sutherland’s stage personae. Precise definitions for Butoh are elusive. In its 70s avant-guardist incarnation, it typically featured near-naked, white-powdered men in loincloths. They appeared entwined in interminably slow micro-gestures of deeply purposeful movements. Certainly, Somerville doesn’t present the grunts. But he uses a Butoh derived “vocabulary” to express his essential youthful state as he effortlessly glides into the essence that is Dame Joan in full and glorious flight. It’s a passionate, personal and plausible transformation to heaven and back; and back again. And expressing transformation is the precept Somerville utilises from Butoh.
Somerville’s use of props extends his elementally, essentialist approach of realising Dame Joan. From a pile of slept-in bed sheets and pillowcases, he conjures up imaginings of the magnificent costumes from her iconic-defining wardrobe. That Tracey Emin’s unmade bedclothes were as useful. Costumed, Somerville personifies Dame Joan in her radiant glory. He emphasises her fallings down. “She was the best in the business for her fallings over”, smiles Somerville. To keep dying, over and over again, seems to offer a sublime reward.
Young Daniel Somerville moved into his sparsely furnished bedsit at 18, after his mother let him know he was probably gay. He may have been the last to know! Despite his unusual awakening, Somerville found the mid-eighties “ a great time to be young and gay... There was this really big queer kind of counter-culture... I was already in the world as an independent adult... You would go out to the clubs. You would see Boy George... and from the high arts, Derek Jarman...”
Young Daniel entered the gay world as a pre-formed old soul; he loved the opera. When he moved into his bedsit, he was seeing two or three operas a week. With his contemporaries in the clubs, Somerville found himself, "completely alone in this passion."
Somerville's family life had been no different from that of many other genteel middle-class homes of South East England. "We didn't really engage with our emotions," he says with appropriate understatement.
The opera house was “where my emotional life was” he recalls. “I lived vicariously” through it. “I think I learned about emotions through opera... [all these] incredibly powerful emotions, coursing through the air, vibrating inside you.”
And at the opera house, he soon encountered that long-established figure of the opera demi-monde—the older “opera queen”. “Everyone would speak to you at the opera house... I felt very at home in the company of these men... we related to the world in the same way, which was through opera.” Somerville had found his tribe.
When Somerville embarked on his opera life, many opera queens still existed on the margins of the opera world. Today, he finds the QEr’D appeal of opera more directly acknowledged than ever before. “If you’re going to see Der Rosenkavalier, lots of lesbian women will go and see that.” Ever the performance academic, Somerville digresses to discuss lesbian diva worship as a phenomenon in its own right. Der Rosenkavalier, in 1911, established the “trouser role” for female singers. Here, the character of Octavia is a woman singing the role of a man. As Somerville’s notes, the part "is quite eroticised and attracted hordes of adoring women fans from the outset".
Admiring Joan Sutherland is so much more than a biography of Dame Joan Sutherland. Somerville says “It’s about how I relate to her and therefore how I relate to opera, and how I relate to the world”. Through his performance, audiences gain a loving appreciation of the passions and perspectives of the opera queen; and a broader appreciation of the deep emotional resonances emanating from this highly developed art form. Indeed, does one have to be a queen, to be an opera queen?... Not really, but it might help.
... a theatrical tour de force and redefines the possibilities for one-man-shows for all Fringes to come.
Somerville owns his stage with sly wit and a physical grace ... Admiring La Stupenda is, in this reviewer’s opinion, the best show of this year’s Fringe to date.
—The Wee Review, Edinburgh
We’re going deeper than camp, deeper than the rules that we use to order our thoughts, and down into the seething, yearning, pools of feeling that most of us fear to drown in.
—The Theatre Bubble