Gente, gente! Productions sails into 2026 with a bold new double bill directed by Bec Moret, featuring Ralph Vaughan Williams’ one act opera Riders to the Sea and a selection of works by his protégée, Dame Elizabeth Maconchy.
Conducted by Dr Joanna Drimatis, the production centres female perspectives on and off the stage. Women remain significantly underrepresented in leadership roles within major Australian opera companies. Gente, gente! offers a necessary shift for the New South Wales industry by challenging limiting operatic tropes and reimagining these works for contemporary audiences.
The Scoop chatted to director Bec Moret ahead of the season. Read the full interview below.
You’re returning to Gente, gente! after directing Dialogues des Carmélites in 2024. What drew you back to the company for this new double bill?
Gente, gente! stands for two things I’m very passionate about – opera, and centring the stories of women. In Dialogues des Carmélites, we dealt with such huge events and themes – it’s a work of truly epic scale, especially for an independent company like Gente, gente! So one of the things that was so appealing about putting together this program and that made it a big departure was its intimacy.
In Vaughan Williams’ Riders to the Sea, the focus sits so closely on the characters and the moment-by-moment shifts in their understanding and emotional stakes. Many emerging artists have been trained to be so focused on the sheer, monumental athletic challenge that is operatic singing that being able to dive into the complexities of human psychology offered by such an intricate dramatic work is a huge gift.
And pairing Riders to the Sea – a haunting work centred on the lives of three women but written by men – with a selection of works by Elizabeth Maconchy, who studied composition with Vaughan Williams, gives us a wonderful opportunity to reframe and add context to this heart-wrenching work.
Although the two pieces are by different composers, they speak to each other in subtle ways. What thematic or emotional threads do you see connecting them?
Riders to the Sea is an intricate domestic drama about how we communicate (and fail to communicate) with our loved ones. At its heart is the question of whether we can really value the lives of those closest to us when we’re also dependent on them for survival.
But it’s also a work about the private lives of women, written by two men. Sympathetic as they may be, Synge and Vaughan Williams aren’t internal to that tragedy.
In Riders to the Sea, the story ends with the death of the final male family member, leaving three women apparently alone in the world. Pairing it with the works of Elizabeth Maconchy lets us examine that assumption – that once the men are gone, the story is over. We know that isn’t true. History is packed with women whose lives went on – rich, eventful and often unrecorded – long after a final date was etched for the notable man in her life.
And Maconchy’s work, which pairs poetry and folk song, myths and cheeky innuendos, gives us a wonderful match for John Synge’s brilliant flavour of grounded, authentic patois peppered with throw-away legends and almost-accidental symbolism.
Riders to the Sea is often described as a ‘gut punch’ of a work. What do you think gives it such enduring emotional power?
Riders to the Sea is perfect proof that the more specific your storytelling, the more relatable it can be to an audience. Riders is built on granular detail of a very particular time and place – the first years of the 20th century, on the tiny Aran Islands off the coast of Ireland.
And in its intricate specifics, it creates a world that is complete and believable – and so becomes ripe soil for the subtle complexities of human relationships under duress. What it is to live in a world coming apart at the seams, through tragedies that shake your whole world. Wondering if you, if those you love, can survive that change – or if you’ll unravel right along with the life you’ve always known.
Maurya’s story is one of endurance rather than action. How are you approaching staging that kind of quiet devastation without sentimentalising it?
I think Maurya’s a very active character, but one whose choices aren’t well-suited to her goal. She’s so consumed with her own grief, with her fear of losing the world as she knows it, that she refuses to see her children and how they’re struggling too.
She’s certainly not the only one making mistakes – but as I see it, her self-appointed role as Cassandra of the story, predicting terrible things to come and not being believed, is an active choice that creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maurya contributes to the tragedy by alienating her children and then must grapple with the consequences.
The opera explores what it means to be a mother, daughter, and sister in a world structured around men. How are you working with the cast to bring those relationships to the foreground?
By the end of Riders to the Sea, a mother and her daughters are forced to face not only tragedy, but also the way they’ve moulded their lives around the men in their lives. Through this tragedy, these three women really see and value each other for the very first time.
The beauty of an opera adapted so closely from such a tightly-written piece of literature is that everything is in the text – in the hierarchy of language, in the rhythm and variation of dialogue, in pulling words to pieces to find how these different generations of women understand their world. So doing that work with the singers to detail and differentiate those relationships is a real delight.
Opera has long been associated with exclusivity. What does it mean to you, as a director, to be part of a company that invites audiences in on a pay-what-you-can basis? What do you say to someone who thinks opera is ‘not for them’?
Opera is an incredibly human thing. It’s not naturalistic, because being human isn’t the arms-length viewing experience of naturalism. The power of the unamplified human voice has an uncanny ability to let us feel with other people, in all their desires and fears and hormonal chaos. At its best, opera is both incredibly heightened and impossibly real and immediate in the very same moment.
The payoff when it all comes together in opera is massive. It’s one of those experiences where you just need to be there, a shared experience for audiences and performers that you never forget.
But the great challenge is that it requires enormous preparation and live, in-person performances from a huge number of expert artists to pull that off, so training, rehearsal and performances can be very expensive endeavours.
A pay-what-you-can policy really helps – it lets people who just want to take a chance come along for whatever a new experience is worth to them – and it allows those who are more familiar with our work and want to support us to chip in more if they like.
And for those of us who are just passionate about sharing the almost miraculous experience of opera with others, we’re always looking for ways to make it easier for people to try it out.
Gente, gente! creates professional opportunities for early and mid-career artists beyond traditional age-limited programs. Why is that kind of support so vital?
Traditionally, emerging artist opportunities for opera professionals have been tightly age-limited – and very often those age limits are totally different for men and women applying to the same program.
If you ask the administrators for a rationale, you may hear something about male voices requiring more time, more maturity, to develop. But there is no biological basis for that claim. Both male and female operatic voices take the same physical maturity to develop.
The truth is that there are a lot more women and AFAB people who train in opera than there are men, so administrators can afford to be choosy. And the way many companies get choosy with women is in age discrimination.
But I think that’s looking at the whole situation backwards. It seems to me that if you want great artistry, and you have more exceptional female voices than you do male voices, then what you have isn’t a deficit of male singers – it’s a deficit of female roles.
So part of what Gente gente! is aiming to do is find those female voices that have been sidelined, and put them onstage.
As a director, what excites you most about working with artists at this stage of their careers?
There’s sometimes a very special moment working with emerging artists, when you get to see them pull off something they thought they couldn’t do. When right in front of your eyes, a particular image or phrase or scene connects and comes to life, and goes from seeming impossible to really happening. It’s wonderful to be a part of that.
What do you hope audiences leave thinking, or feeling, after experiencing this double bill?
That like Maurya, Cathleen and Nora, they come away seeing with new eyes the potential of the women around them, the depth of their feeling and the scope of their lives – and that they feel excited about discovering more of the work of extraordinary women composers, creatives, singers and conductors that deserve the spotlight.
Finally, what kind of stories are you most eager to tell next?
When we’re in a position to do so, I would love to commission a new opera by a female Australian composer – to create something wholly new and compelling and make a dent in the repertoire!
Riders To The Sea and The Works of Elizabeth Maconchy are presented by Gente, gente! Productions. The double bill runs 28 February to 1 March, Sydney. See details below.
25, 28 Feb, 1 Mar – Hunters Hill Town Hall, 22 Alexandra St, Hunters Hill NSW 2110
27 Feb – Leichhardt Town Hall, Corner of Marion and 107 Norton St, Leichhardt NSW 2040
Tickets: https://events.humanitix.com/riders-to-the-sea-or-works-of-elizabeth-maconchy
Website: https://gentegente.org/
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/gentegenteproductions/ and https://www.instagram.com/becmoret/
Hero image: Lucy Bailes, who will be playing Maurya in Riders to the Sea. Photo by Rob Studdert
Created in partnership with Gente, gente! Productions. For more information about our partnerships, visit here.
