Opera Omnibus: L'Elisir d'Amore (May 1993)

L'Elisir d'Amore (by Gaetano Donizetti) means "the Elixir of Love", and the story is that of a young male peasant (a tenant farmer) who is in love with his young female landlady but doesn't dare tell her so until he drinks a bottle of the Elixir bought from a travelling doctor.

The traveller, a Doctor Dulcamara, arrives in town for a fair after a terrific build-up from the chorus who sing about his amazing golden coach. When a stage property is written into the score of an opera like that it's hard to do a production without it; you can't just change the words if they have to fit the music. So a golden coach the not-so-good Doctor had to have.

In fact, the "Doctor" is a quack -- a total fraud -- and the Elixir is just a bottle of cheap wine from the next county with a phoney label on it. The "courage" it imparts the ignorant imbiber is, despite the usual Italian setting, Dutch.

Anyway, the Haslemere Hall has no room for live horses so it was resolved that the "coach" would be a chair on wheels with sides and a sort of roof, covered in gold effect wallpaper and golden fittings which I created out of papier machá sprayed with a gold paint aerosol. Moyra Finlay, áminence grise and advance planner for the company for many years, helped me obtain a disused hospital chair on huge castors. It had red plastic seats (a satisfactory "leather effect", I thought) and black painted tubular steel frame. I made sides and a canopy from hardboard and bits of timber; we covered it in gold effect wallpaper, and decorated the hood interior with gold and silver stars, moon and other astrological symbols on a matt black ground. It had a very thick gold-spray-painted rope by which some men in the chorus pulled it onto the stage, and it worked fairly well without attracting an inappropriate amount of attention.

After the production I kept the chair and the cladding for it for years in case it was ever wanted again, but eventually the cladding disintegrated and had to go. I still have the basic chair in my roof space ...