The Royal Opera’s adaptation of the shocking Danish film comes with trigger warnings — ‘but the arts are supposed to confront difficult things’, its composer says
n his trademark pork-pie hat and slightly careworn coat, Mark-Anthony Turnage looks less like the composer of the Royal Opera’s big new show than the guy who’s arrived to fix a leaky tap. At 64, the Essex-born Arsenal fan is well aware of his incongruity. Indeed he revels in it.
“I hate wearing suits,” he says. “In fact, I hate all the formal stuff surrounding opera. It was hilarious at the first night of Anna Nicole [his 2011 piece for the Royal Opera, about the Playboy model Anna Nicole Smith who married an 89-year-old billionaire]. Because of the subject matter they rolled out the red carpet and invited people like Boy George and famous fashion designers. Two celebrities walked into the opera house just before me and all the photographers were shouting out to them. Then I walked in — the composer — and there was total silence. No one had a clue who I was.”
Was it that sort of palaver, or the mixed reviews for his 2018 opera Coraline, that prompted Turnage to declare that after composing a string of memorable operas (going back to the acerbic satire Greek in 1988) he was “done with the genre”? He laughs….