The Herald
In a high-security Californian laboratory, men and women of disconcertingly uniform appearance sing beneath a giant pink vat, the looming vessel filled to the brim with surgically removed body parts. This is “man’s highest creation” maintains Armando Iannucci.“The coming together of music, theatre, design, people and coughing.” This is opera.
The Glaswegian writer and producer of such acclaimed comedy creations as Alan Partridge, The Day Today and The Thick Of It, is at Leeds Grand Theatre to see final rehearsals of Skin Deep, a satirical operetta on cosmetic surgery for which he has penned his first libretto. Composed by David Sawer and directed by Richard Jones, the Opera North production opens this Friday, six days before Iannucci’s In The Loop, his debut feature film and cinematic “cousin” to The Thick Of It premieres at the Sundance Festival.
“Putting right what nature got wrong”, Skin Deep has been painstakingly pieced together over five years. Chatting in a rehearsal space adjacent to the theatre, Iannucci can’t disguise his pleasure at finally seeing his work unveiled.
“It’s only now I’m seeing it assembled,” the still-impish 44-year-old enthuses. “I’ve been used to hearing it played on the piano and with everyone singing sitting around on plastic chairs. Only now I’m seeing the costumes and set designs, so I’m beginning to get even more excited.”
Featuring the Dance of the Seven Bandages and the Ballet of Transplant Organs, Skin Deep is the tale of Dr Needlemeier, whose anti-aging elixir, composed of his patients’ boiled off-cuts, requires one more vital ingredient: essence of Hollywood star. After the world’s most famous actor, Luke Pollock, leaves Needlemeier’s alpine clinic “only half the man he was”, scandal breaks and the Swiss doctor flees to America.
Traditionally, opera runneth over with passionate tributes to captivating youth and beauty, though demands for vocal power and range have invariably led to the casting of older, bulkier singers than the plots might seem to suggest. Iannucci has exploited this incongruity before, in a sketch for the 2001 Channel 4 series The Armando Iannucci Shows, in which he imagined attending Ibiza Uncovered: The Opera.
“Richard was watching it at home and thought ‘God, I’ve done productions like that’” Iannucci chuckles. “So he got in touch. We had similar thoughts about what we wanted to do with the story, so the idea came together quickly.”
Since Skin Deep was conceived, the growing popularity of gastric bands, botox and other cosmetic procedures has seen reality threaten to outstrip satire.
“People no longer hide their work, they flaunt it, because it’s about wanting to live the life of a celebrity,” Iannucci sighs. “Parents give 18-year-old daughters cosmetic enhancements for their birthdays.”
He remembers visiting Beverley Hills for a proposed US remake of The Thick Of It, where his hotel “backed onto a plastic surgery clinic. It had a passageway so that guests could be whisked away for their operation, then whisked back to their room to recuperate.
“It was all done quite surreptitiously. Except I was in the bar at 6pm, meeting someone for a drink, and standing there was a surgeon in his scrubs who’d clearly spent the day cracking people’s skulls open and slicing things off.”
A classical music fan since discovering Holst’s Planets at school, Iannucci gorged himself on the library collections at Hillhead, then Govan and became a passionate Wagnerite in his teens “as a reaction” against the Verdi, Puccini and Rossini beloved by his parents. A columnist for Gramophone magazine, he recently took up the piano and remains stuck at grade one, but can trace the effects of his musical exasperation back to his earliest radio work for BBC Scotland. Through 1998 on youth shows like No’ The Archie Macpherson Show and Bite The Wax, he developed the irreverent sound editing that became a hallmark of On The Hour, the landmark radio precursor to The Day Today responsible for launching his career and those of Chris Morris and Steve Coogan among others.
“That BBC Scotland stuff was a product of my frustration that I can’t play an instrument,” he explains. “I’m obsessed by music even though I can’t articulate it, I can’t demonstrate it audibly. Internally though, I like rhythms and pacing, so messing about with audio is probably the next best thing.
“This has given me the chance to mess about with rhythms again,” he says of Skin Deep’s rhyming verse. “Of course, I didn’t dictate what David was doing musically, but we sought a lot of long, languid lines because he wanted it to be quite a slow production. I wasn’t composing but I was dealing in something other than just the words, pointing towards where the music might be going.”
As arguably the UK’s most successful comedy producer of the last 20 years, Iannucci is accustomed to getting the last word but happily bowed to Sawer’s experience this time around.
“Mine is literally the first word,” he acknowledges. “I’m not precious about it, I told David to just chop away. I’ve been getting emails from him saying ‘we need three more lines, each of four syllables, rhyming with ‘ow!’’
Although a creative departure, fans will immediately recognise Iannucci’s hand in Skin Deep, not least in the character of the American news reporter, “a sort of cousin to Barbara Wintergreen” – the character Rebecca Front played in On The Hour and The Day Today – “with lots of puns and wordplay”.
Somewhat surprisingly, Iannucci, who is currently executive producing the BBC’s forthcoming Comedy Vehicle for Stewart Lee, co-creator of Jerry Springer: The Opera, which he downplays as “more of a musical really”, is only a recent convert to the art form, having remained stoically unmoved until he witnessed a Scottish Opera performance of La Traviata.
“I’d always thought opera was a bit mad,” he admits. “But that night, I just thought ‘ah, I see it now’. Live you get the full impact. It’s not just the music. It’s the staging, the acting, the costume, the words, the scenery, the whole ambition of it really.”
Having announced his ambivalence towards Mozart in a keynote speech to the Royal Philharmonic Society in 2006, he concedes that he and Sawer have sought inspiration in the composer’s comedies.
“Well, I’m sort of coming round to him,” he smiles. “The Magic Flute remains one of the most ridiculous things ever though. We also thought about things like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where you begin with very distinct sets of characters and then you mix them up, with mistaken identities and people dressing up. The earliest thought that occurred to me when we started talking about plastic surgery was the notion of face-swapping.”
Unlike breast enhancement, opera is still widely perceived as a pastime for the rich, a fact that roundly irritates him.
“Yes, the most expensive seats are expensive,” he states. “But people pay more to see a football match every fortnight or Coldplay at the O2. Companies like Opera North and the Almeida in London put a lot of effort into making sure it’s available for anyone who’s interested.”
Reflecting Scottish Opera’s forthcoming mini-season in Glasgow, which includes Death of a Scientist about government weapons expert Dr David Kelly, he dismisses the notion that opera cannot be topical.
“If you think about Mozart, Verdi, Puccini and Gilbert and Sullivan, they were all taking on contemporary political and social themes. I remember going to see John Adams’ Nixon in China and thinking this is what opera should be doing. We should be singing about the credit crunch.”
