Design for Theatre and Opera

Electra revived the Old Vic’s pre-war tradition of regularly including a Greek play in its repertoire. The play ran from March until April 1951 and starred Peggy Ashcroft in the title role. The play centres around Electra and her brother Orestes’ struggle to gain justice for the murder of their father, King Agamemnon, who was killed by their mother, Clytemnestra, and her new lover, Aegisthus, on his return from the Trojan War.

Hepworth produced a new sculpture for the production, Apollo (1951), made of bent steel rods, which seems to reference the god Apollo. Although Apollo does not feature among the list of characters in the play, the god’s presence is clearly felt.  The sculpture was placed on a base stage left and often formed a focal point for the action of the play.

Apollo was Hepworth’s first work in metal, made in an edition of two, and one of only two occasions in which she would work in steel. A report in the Daily Telegraph and Morning Post provided an explanation for this choice of material, stating: 

'The statue of Apollo before the Palace of Mycenae has been done in wire as Miss Hepworth, who is a sculptor of reputation, thought a normal form would dominate the stage.'

Despite this, Hepworth was not Covent Garden’s first choice to design the set and costumes: Graham Sutherland and Ben Nicholson were initially approached but both were unable to accept. This was fortuitous for Tippett, who found in Hepworth an 'extraordinary degree of artistic sympathy’ and a collaborator who could realise his visual conception for the opera.

The libretto for The Midsummer Marriage was written by Tippett himself and bears similarities to both Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Richard Strauss’ The Woman without a Shadow. The story follows two couples on their journey to marriage,  one royal and one ‘everyday’.

The opera brings together modern and ancient life, fusing together the worlds of the natural and the supernatural. The characters are split between those from the modern day (the two sets of couples) and the mysterious figures of The Ancients and Sosostris, a clairvoyante. The opera takes place on Midsummer’s Day – as referenced in the title – in a wood with a Greek temple and a cave.
 

Like her earlier set for Electra, the buildings in Hepworth’s set for The Midsummer Marriage consisted of square and rectangular structures. The main part of the set was painted white, set against vertical rectangles in primary colours. 

Reflecting on the criticism ten years later in a tribute to Tippett, Hepworth renewed her belief that despite its ‘worldy defeat’, The Midsummer Marriage nonetheless offered a new ‘abstract’ vision for opera in the future:

'At the time I thought that The Midsummer Marriage contained a new idea for opera: a concept which I felt could open the doors for a formal concept of opera in the future. Ten years later I still think the same way about it. If this opera suffered a defeat,  it was a worldly defeat – and only of consequence in so far as it set back the natural development in this field by perhaps twenty years.