This month, State Opera South Australia will present Roméo et Juliette in a brand-new co-production with West Australian Opera and Irish National Opera, and Artistic Director Dane Lam can’t hide his excitement at tackling Gounod’s score. “It straddles this path between Meyerbeer and Bizet,” he tells Limelight. “There’s great lyricism and evocative use of the orchestra to portray the intimate inner world of Roméo and Juliette.”

Kyle Stegall and Siobhan Stagg for State Opera South Australia’s Romeo et Juliette. Photo supplied

Bringing the star-crossed lovers to life are American-born tenor Kyle Stegall and Australian soprano Siobhan Stagg, who is making her role debut as Juliette. 

“This will be the first time Siobhan and Kyle sing together, and I think it will be magical – a musical match made in heaven,” says Lam. “Kyle is a stylish performer at the forefront of historically informed singing and practice. He always finds a way of colouring the text in such a dramatic and musically sensitive manner.” 

Describing Stagg as “one of Australia’s great singers,” Lam says, “She’s going to be fantastic, and she’s going to sing Juliette’s aria Amour, ranime mon courage in this production.” Also known as the Poison Aria, it includes two prominent high Cs and is often cut to conserve energy before the final act’s transcendent duet. 

“It really shows the transformation of Juliette’s character from ingénue to something much deeper and more mature,” says Lam. 

This theme of transformation lies at the heart of director Rodula Gaitanou’s vision. “The extraordinary strength this piece has is that their love is not mundane, it’s transformative, and this is where the idea for the production design comes from,” she says.

Costume designs by takis for the men’s chorus in Act One of Roméo et Juliette. Images © takis

Athens-born, Paris-trained and London-based, Gaitanou has previously received two Helpmann Award nominations for her Royal Opera House production of Haydn’s L’isola disabitata which played at the Hobart Baroque Festival in 2013. Five years later, she directed the first Australian staging of Rossini’s William Tell in over a century with Victorian Opera.

Together with internationally renowned designer takis and lighting designer Bernie Tan-Hayes, she envisions “a symbolic, suspended space in between society and intimacy” – a world that is “earthly yet celestial” with takis’s costume designs for the chorus in Act One even riffing on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She describes it as a space that holds juxtaposition, underlining “the threat of detection, but at the same time the promise of secret love”.

Structurally, she explains, the opera is “based on four very powerful love duets” that drive the work to its “ecstatic” finale. “In Shakespeare, we have a rich political context, but in the opera, the focus is on the love story. We tend to focus on what separates them, but here you have these two people who focus on what unites them,” Gaitanou explains.

“The thing that, to me, is the most tragic, the most heartbreaking and the most intense is that this is a story not just of two lovers but two very young people. From the get-go, I wanted to create a show that had a lot of youth in it, to bring out something that will speak to very young people and still feel fresh and relevant when it’s performed in Dublin in 2028.”

Gaitanou is thrilled to be mounting this production for Australian audiences. “They are extremely forward-looking with a capacity to take an in-depth look at things,” she says, adding, “It’s a big project, and I feel very honoured.” 

Roméo et Juliette plays at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Adelaide, 23 October – 1 November.