Rusalka director Sarah Giles on the arts ‘crisis’ no one wants to talk about
As she challenges opera’s doomed diva tradition, acclaimed director Sarah Giles asks: Does the arts have a problem with women leaders?
From Madama Butterfly’s Cio-Cio-San committing harakiri to Tosca leaping to her death from a parapet at Rome’s Castel Sant’Angelo, opera’s heroines have rarely mastered the art of longevity. Prone to madness, suicide, bad boyfriends and performative coughs that prove fatal, these doomed heroines often attract bad press in the #MeToo era.
French scholar Catherine Clement has written that classical characters such as La traviata’s Violetta and Verdi’s Luisa Miller are part of a “great masculine scheme … thought up to adore, and also to kill, the feminine character’’, while The Guardian’s Charlotte Higgins has argued that opera, an art form centred on white-hot emotion and “human catastrophe … seems to devour women”. (Opera’s heroines do, of course, get the best frocks and tunes.)
Melbourne director Sarah Giles is aware of opera’s doomed divas trope, and tells Review she was determined to infuse a feminist sensibility into her latest production, Dvorak’s tragic fairy tale, Rusalka, in order to avoid a traditional interpretation “that sucks”.
Speaking down the line from her Melbourne home on a chilly winter’s day, Giles says bluntly: “There’s a version of this opera, which is quite bad, which goes a little something like this: Naive, stupid, underwater nymph falls in love with prince at first sight, abandons everything in order to love him, has to compete with another woman for his love, and then sacrifices herself so the man can be really happy.
“That sucks. I don’t want to watch that. So we’ve shifted things and found new ways in. That’s what I love about opera. It’s not as prescriptive as you think it is.’’
Featuring Australian superstar Nicole Car in the title role, Giles’s critically acclaimed production for Opera Conference, a national partnership of state opera companies and Opera Australia, opens at the Sydney Opera House on July 19.
It’s not as if the straight-talking director – who describes the recent “mass exodus” of women leaders from the arts in Australia as a “crisis” – can turn a classical opera informed by Slavic mythology and Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid into a 21st century feminist manifesto.
A Helpmann and Green Room award nominee, Giles has two productions (La traviata and Rusalka) at Opera Australia this year. When it comes to reinventing classic operas, she says she simply looks at the art form’s female characters “from my perspective, which is a woman’s perspective. And so all of a sudden, you start to see things inside that story that maybe haven’t been brought out by previous directors.’’
She reimagines Rusalka – the water nymph who sacrifices her power of speech to be with her human prince – as a “brave creature” searching for a place where she feels she belongs rather than “the mute, silenced, passive, lovesick (nymph)’’.
Giles is refreshingly, even courageously candid, whether she is talking about the challenges of juggling a young family with working interstate, or the arts industry’s recent, unprecedented leadership turmoil, which has seen a raft of female bosses prematurely depart flagship companies including the Adelaide Festival, Queensland Ballet, Opera Australia and Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.
While not commenting on a specific company, Giles says of this trend: “Whether they’re being pushed out or being fired or quitting, I think that if you look at the numbers of women who have left high-profile jobs in the arts in the last five years, it’s breathtaking. … There are some questions here that need to be asked, regarding who is appointing them, who is asking them to leave.’’
Traditional opera’s “cry and die” syndrome has been well documented but Giles raises the question of whether the Australian arts industry has its own women problem. “Do we have an issue, do we have a fundamental issue with a female leadership style?’’ she asks provocatively.
She continues: “I mean, when you start to look at it, you go, there’s a crisis … No one’s talking about it. It’s sort of, you just move on. And I think there’s this underlying idea that ‘Oh, maybe women aren’t good leaders’. You know, it’s sort of sickening, because it’s not the case.’’
Asked where this apparent industry view is coming from, she responds: “Oh, I’ve got no idea.’’ She adds, however, that questions need to be asked about “where the power inside these companies lies and how does it work?”
Aged 41 and known for her sharp-edged comedies and, increasingly, for her opera work, Giles has toured the country while directing more than 25 productions for flagship troupes including the Sydney and Melbourne theatre companies, Malthouse, Sydney Chamber Opera, Opera Queensland and Opera Australia.
A director, writer and dramaturge, she has worked on hit shows including Dario Fo’s No Pay? No Way!, which had two outings at STC in 2020 and 2024, while her 2023 production of The Importance of Being Earnest for the same company expanded the servants’ roles and threw into sharp relief the aristocratic characters’ self-parodying silliness and arrogance. In 2019, she garnered Helpmann and Green Room award nominations for her direction of the new opera, Lorelei, for Victorian Opera.
Ten years earlier – and just one year after she completed a postgraduate directing course at NIDA – she was appointed director in residence at Sydney’s Griffin Theatre. Three years after that, then STC artistic directors Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton anointed her as the Richard Wherrett Fellow and in 2013 she became a resident director at the company.
Despite these achievements, when Giles gave birth to her kids, Wilma, now 10, and Tom, seven, she felt “kind of terrified and was going ‘Oh God, maybe I’ll never make work again’. What I didn’t realise was that having kids would make me make the best work I’ve ever made … I firmly believe my work got better after kids because something shifted in my perspective in terms of my ability to take risk.’’
When she was starting out as a newbie director, did she feel there was a prevailing idea that women do not make capable or financially savvy arts leaders? “Yeah, of course,’’ she replies emphatically, noting how she was rarely paired with a woman director when she was a trainee. “I dunno,’’ she reflects. “It’s like an airborne disease – you sort of can feel it in the kind of bias, an unconscious bias that we all (men and women) have because we are all part of the same society.’’
To illustrate her point, she mentions that before the New York Philharmonic Orchestra moved to blind auditions in the 1970s, it was overwhelmingly dominated by male musicians. “After the blind auditions, lo and behold they evened it out,’’ she says. (Women now account for just over 50 per cent of the performers with the US’s oldest symphony orchestra.)
Asked whether it is difficult directing shows interstate with young children at home, she exclaims: “Oh my god, yes! I’m so happy to talk about this. And I’m not one of those people who are like ‘Do you ask men that?’ (This reporter does ask that of dads who tour, as it happens).
“I just think the more we talk about it, and the more open we are about it, the less kind of hidden or closed (it will be).’’
She calls out the “perverse” belief that not mentioning your children at work is a sign of professional commitment. “I think there’s a really perverse attitude that the height of professionalism is not talking about your children,’’ she says. “I remember hearing really early on in my career, a very high up person inside a theatre company saying ‘So and so never talks about her children. You wouldn’t even know she had them. That’s how professional she is.’ I remember marking this moment going, that’s really f..ked up.’’
When Giles’s children were babies, her mother, still working as an endocrinologist, would take time off work and tour with her to help look after them. It was a way of “paying forward” the work Giles’s grandparents had done, helping to raise her while her mother pursued her medical career.
Now that the children are in school, “it’s trickier. So they can’t come with me and I miss them. And I can’t be away for longer than – two weeks is probably my max and I start to go a bit crazy.’’ Her husband, she says, is also supportive “and we just fly around. It’s the nature of working in the arts in Australia – you just have to kind of go where the work is. ‘’
Having said that, Giles, who this year directed her first short film, Writers in Love, is “trying to put more roots down in Melbourne. I’ll try to do more work here so that I’m not travelling as much as I have been.’’ She is also developing an operatic comedy with Ash Flanders and Luke de Sommar.
On this wintry Melbourne day, she walked her kids to school when it was 7C, then declares Sydneysiders are too soft about cold weather. She says: “I’m domestically frantic, trying to prep to go to Sydney, and then tomorrow I’m going to be in a rehearsal room.’’ As she moves from the domestic whirl into serious, creative work, “it’s like your whole core spins or it shifts, something happens’’.
Giles’s production of Rusalka is a kind of homecoming for Car – one of Australia’s most successful opera exports – who will return to the Sydney Opera House’s Joan Sutherland Theatre for the first time in seven years to play the water nymph.
.Giles says of the soprano, who will portray Rusalka at the Opera de Paris and Wienerstaatsoper after her Sydney run: “She’s a massive superstar, and according to every single person I’ve spoken to, also the nicest person you’ve ever met.’’
While the director and singer had not met before Rusalka’s rehearsals got under way, Giles says they share children the same age, and clicked instantly. “I’m incredibly excited to see her on stage in this role. Her presence, her voice, and the clarity of her performance are otherworldly,” she says.
While Rusalka sings the famously poignant aria, Song to the Moon – one of the repertoire’s most beautiful pieces – she remains mute for a significant part of the opera. Giles says it’s “an enormous role from an acting perspective,” as the soprano playing Rusalka must connect with the audience using only her face and body.
She adds that Car’s reputation as “a brilliant performer and a brilliant actor” precedes her. “That’s the thing I find particularly exciting about this opera – that you get to know that character on so many different levels.’’
Rusalka was commissioned by Opera Conference, which pools the resources of companies including OA, Opera Queensland, South Australian Opera and West Australian Opera, to defray the costs of mounting a new production.
Giles says it can be “breathtakingly, staggeringly expensive’’ to develop a new opera production, and that the shared model allows one new show to tour to several cities. “I think it’s really about giving Australian creatives the opportunity to do work at scale. For me, it’s been a game changer,’’ she says, highlighting the support she has had from Opera Queensland chief Patrick Nolan.
She had not done a full-scale classical opera when Opera Conference came calling. In 2022, she was offered Verdi’s La traviata and says that before then, “the idea of doing a large scale new production of a classic – I didn’t think that was really on the cards.’’
This crowd-pleasing opera depicts a sabotaged affair between the courtesan Violetta and a naive, bourgeois young man, and Giles reveals her production was informed by the diaries of real-life 19th century Parisian courtesan Mogador. “They (the diaries) were really different to all the productions of Trav I’d seen. I was like, what? Mogador was one of the only sex workers or courtesans who managed to crawl her way out of abject poverty, and was eventually almost accepted by society.’’
Launched at West Australian Opera, Giles’s production earned five-star reviews, with critics agreeing her interpretation captured Violetta’s vigour as well as her vulnerability, and thus “breathed new life” into the classic. The show opened with the courtesan just having had sex while a boisterous party was in full swing in the room next door.
As one critic wrote: “Giles has empowered Violetta by seeing her through a feminist lens, but she does so with a gentle and empathetic touch.’’
La traviata went on to be staged by Opera Queensland and the State Theatre Company of South Australia and its first Opera Australia season in 2024 sold out. It has been a significant career breakthrough for Giles, given she had not expected to be offered a full-scale opera. She says her production has had six outings and that she had a “fab” time working on it.
The director’s visually stunning production of Rusalka, which is likely to tour to Brisbane and Adelaide, debuted at WA Opera in 2024 and is a complex piece of theatrical architecture. It features three worlds: an underwater realm topped by waterlilies that drew gasps from the opening night audience in Perth, a human world, and a magic world that needed to be adaptable enough to tour and play in different venues.
Featuring video design by David Bergman – the same man who worked on STC’s international “cinetheatre” hit The Picture of Dorian Gray – Rusalka also features the lead character suspended in what Giles calls a kind of “purgatory”, after she turns into a will of the wisp, luring humans to their death.
The West Australian described Giles’s Rusalka as a “visual and vocal feast” while Limelight critic Emma Jayakumar wrote that it was “a potent reminder that opera is a hybrid beast with real power to engage and sometimes overwhelm’’.
OA snapped up the production and just two performers from the Perth season, Warwick Fyfe who plays the water king and Ashlyn Timms who portrays the witch Jezibaba, will reprise their roles in Sydney. “So it’s a whole new chorus, new conductor, (mostly) new principals. But the same creative team,’’ says Giles, who adds that she and her long-time design collaborator Charles Davis, approached the staging as if it were a Rubik’s cube.
Thoughtful yet forthright, Giles says her approach is not to reject the traditional opera canon, but to unearth new meanings “that liberate it”. “It’s like these stories have a surface and then there’s more going on underneath,’’ she says. “I just get really excited about how many other operas or plays there are out there, that have been interpreted in a not terribly interesting or complex way. I think it’s all about perspective.’’
Rusalka opens at the Sydney Opera House on July 19.
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