I should begin with a Reader Warning: this article includes frequent and graphic references to nudity, sex and violence.
Opera has always had a taste for the outrageous. Murder, adultery, incest, madness, blasphemy… all that was part of opera’s shock value long before the modern director arrived with productions full of fetish gear, full-frontal nudity and a general air of debauchery. The score remains sacred; the staging, meanwhile, has become a public test of nerve. Can the audience take it? Will sponsors keep smiling? Can the critics bear it? And, perhaps most tantalisingly, can the director get away with it?
Calixto Beito... sordid sexual encounters and moral collapse
The Catalan director Calixto Bieito is perhaps the high priest of such theatrical affrontery. His UK debut with Mozart’s Don Giovanni at English National Opera in 2001 unleashed in British opera houses what became known as his trademark: sordid sexual encounters and an atmosphere of moral collapse. Scandalised critics dismissed it as a ‘coke-fuelled fellatio-fest’, prompting conductor David Parry to counteract: ‘Critics are very weird… prissy, in a way – they don’t see beyond the surface. I don’t know how you can’t see that this production is a very serious examination of the piece.’
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More Beito... 14 conspirators on the loo
True to form, a year later Bieito’s staging of Verdi's A Masked Ball at ENO pushed the envelope even further. The curtain went up to reveal a row of 14 conspirators sitting on the loo… (‘and not one remembers to pull the chain’, Andrew Clements pointed out wryly in his Guardian review). What followed were graphic scenes of nudity, masturbation and homosexual rape. Front-page hysteria was guaranteed. The Telegraph’s Rupert Christiansen was one of the production’s fiercest critics, questioning its relevance to Verdi’s opera, calling it ‘corny, jejune and faintly sickening in its sensationalism’. Michael Billington in The Guardian, on the other hand, praised how Bieito brought ‘a savage contemporary edge’ to Verdi’s drama, admiring its urgency and refusal to sentimentalise power. The boos at curtain call were real enough – but so were the cheers. Bieito had done what he generally does: make the staging itself the main event.
In Berlin, he went to greater extremes. Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail included explicit sexual humiliation and staged urination. Even hardened German critics had their doubts: Manuel Brug in Die Welt described it as ‘a theatre of calculated provocation’ and, judging by the opening night outcry at the Komische Oper, he was right.
Damiano Michieletto... gratuitous sexual violence
Few British scandals have erupted quite as noisily as Damiano Michieletto’s Guillaume Tell at the Royal Opera House in 2015. During the ballet music in Act III, Michieletto introduced a graphic sexual assault of a naked ballerina by a group of soldiers – the collision between Rossini’s poised score and the brutality on stage produced immediate uproar. The Stage gave the production one star, its chief opera critic George Hall calling it a ‘dire evening’ in which the ‘gratuitous gang-rape’ scene provoked ‘the noisiest and most sustained booing I can ever recall during any performance at this address’. Hall went on to damn the whole affair as ‘intellectually poverty-stricken, emotionally crass and with indifferent stagecraft’.
Michael Arditti in The Sunday Express said the production represented a ‘new nadir’ for the opera house and that ‘heads should roll’. The charity Eaves, which supports women who have experienced violence, spoke up with the rebuke that sexual violence in conflict can be dealt with in sensitive ways, but not as ‘gratuitous entertainment’. Tim Ashley in The Guardian called the scene ‘viscerally shocking’ though he questioned whether it tipped into excess. Christiansen, in The Telegraph, was blunter, describing it as ‘deeply distasteful and dramatically crude’.
In due course, there came an apology from the Royal Ballet and Opera but Michieletto himself gave a fairly standard directorial defence of his work: ‘You have to provoke in a good sense. Theatre is not a temple, theatre is not a church, theatre is a place of freedom, of challenging, of emotions, of life.’ But audiences weren’t buying it. The depth of outrage meant the production was toned down after opening night – a rare moment when Covent Garden effectively admitted a director’s idea had landed badly.
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Katie Mitchell... psychological realism
A year later at the Royal Opera, Katie Mitchell’s Lucia di Lammermoor caused a different sort of stir: less tabloid, more intellectual. Mitchell foregrounded sexual coercion in Donizetti’s opera and implied that abuse was the cause of Lucia’s breakdown. In The Guardian, Tim Ashley praised its ‘meticulous psychological realism’, suggesting it stripped away Romantic varnish to reveal systemic oppression. Christiansen wondered whether such heavy underlining of the subtext sat comfortably with Donizetti’s bel canto style. It was the familiar split-screen: one side applauds fearless re-examination; the other sees the score crushed beneath directorial self-indulgence.
Provocative Wagner productions
An over-active imagination was certainly at play in Bayreuth in 2010, when Hans Neuenfels staged Wagner’s Lohengrin with the chorus dressed as lab rats. Bonkers, but you have to admire the nerve. The Guardian’s Andrew Clements called it ‘provocative but oddly compelling’, while German critics denounced it as Regietheater gone berserk. Opening night ended in the usual mix of boos and applause, with the production later settling into something like cult status. Which is one of opera’s more amusing habits: today’s outrage is always liable to become tomorrow’s classic.
The most extreme instance, perhaps, came in Düsseldorf in 2013, when Wagner’s Tannhäuser at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein included Nazi executions and gas-chamber imagery of such force that the company withdrew the staging after the premiere and reverted to a concert performance. Even by the standards of modern European opera, this was judged to have gone too far.
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Florentina Holzinger’s Sancta... sex, blood and naked roller-skating nuns
Clearly not far enough, however. Over to Stuttgart Opera in 2024, with Florentina Holzinger’s Sancta – a no-holds-barred re-imagining of Hindemith’s 1921 Sancta Susanna that featured live piercing, unsimulated sex, explicit religious imagery, naked roller-skating nuns, a lesbian priest saying mass, and copious quantities of fake and real blood. Stuttgart Opera advised audiences to read the warnings carefully and, if necessary, avert their gaze. Eighteen audience members were nonetheless reported to have required medical treatment for severe nausea across two performances.
In fact, Sancta proves a larger point. For all the outrage – including denunciations from bishops when the production played in Vienna – the scandal led to huge commercial success. The Stuttgart performances sold out, as did later dates in Berlin. So, although an opera production can still make people faint, recoil or walk out, what it seems less able to do these days is trigger any lasting moral crisis. Shock is all part of the PR build-up leading to opening night and box-office success.
Is shock no longer shocking?
Which leads me to wonder if shock is in itself no longer shocking. We have been watching directors lob grenades into the repertoire for so long that many of us now take our seats half-expecting at least one outrage before the first interval. Bring on the sexual degradation, fascist imagery, gallons of blood… and that’s just during the overture. For a while, opera houses seemed engaged in a gleeful arms race of provocation. Now, even after the most depraved first act, we barely raise an eyebrow as we reach for our interval glass of fizz.
A good example of this ‘anything goes’ approach to shock was Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Festen at Covent Garden in 2025. Festen ought, on paper, to be among the most shocking operas imaginable. Based on Thomas Vinterberg’s film, it deals with family trauma, humiliation and drawn-out emotional brutality. The Royal Opera’s own guidance flagged child sexual abuse, suicide, addiction, racist behaviour, sex and violence, all packed into a taut 95-minute evening with no interval.
This time, however, there was no moral outrage in the headlines. Critics found Richard Jones’s production gripping, appalling, darkly funny and emotionally bruising. The Bachtrack website admired how it managed to be ‘richly entertaining’ even as it shocked. And that is precisely the point: Festen was indeed shocking, but not in the old scandalised sense. There were no grand spasms in the press over whether such things should appear on the operatic stage at all. The material shocked, but the fact of its being shown in an opera did not.
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Thomas Adès Powder Her Face... drama, incest and abuse
That makes an illuminating contrast with Thomas Adès’s Powder Her Face, which really did cause a stir when it appeared in 1995. Inspired by the Duchess of Argyll scandal, Adès’s opera acquired instant notoriety for its scene where the Duchess fellates a waiter on stage, set to highly evocative music. So, in 1995 an operatic act of fellatio could still send people reaching for the smelling salts; by 2025, with opera audiences inured to shock, a drama of incest, abuse and familial collapse could be received, quite rightly, as serious and compelling music theatre. That’s not because opera has grown tamer. Quite the reverse: it’s because audiences have become harder to scandalise by surface provocation alone.
The critical divide remains. Radical productions are still praised in some quarters as ‘visceral’, ‘fearless’ and ‘urgent’, and denounced in others as ‘gratuitous’, ‘crude’ and ‘attention-seeking’. British opera criticism still reads, at times, like a long-running marital dispute conducted through the arts pages.
Perhaps that is where the real shock now lies. Not in the lavatories, the violence or the nudity, but in the stubborn fact that opera is still perfectly capable of causing a scene. In a much-publicised interview, Hollywood idol Timothée Chalamet recently dismissed opera as one of those art forms that ‘no one cares about anymore’ (see p13). He was quite wrong: opera still provokes arguments, sometimes blazing ones. It can still make audiences boo, applaud, heckle, defend, denounce and write furious letters. Nowadays, directors can throw almost anything at us. What matters is whether the shock lands as mere sensation, or as a thought-provoking piece of art.
