Tamerlano

This project continues the long established collaborative relationship between Hudson and Director Graham Vick. It was concerned with exploring the ways in which scenography might be employed to enhance a contemporary audience’s engagement and reception of the highly stylised musical structures of the operatic work of George Frederick Handel. Hudson drew on influences from Indian, Turkish and Iranian sources, particularly Indian and Persian miniatures, textiles and ceramics to ground the production in the lands of Tamburlaine’s conquest. He experimented with scale, the juxtaposition of the monumental and the human creating a world dominated by a vast sphere, at once literal and abstract pitting the human body against a geometry of sharp colour and precise symbolism. The costumes presented a hybrid of eighteenth century European and the Oriental, brilliantly coloured and minutely detailed, in contrast to the simple minimalism of the set. Tamerlano is structured as a series of arias and long recitatives with little action and this can be alienating for a modern audience. Hudson sought ways to echo this musical structure, whose forward movement is at times almost imperceptible, by staging a visual subtext of slow background activity that supported the performers without detracting from their presence on stage. A procession of miniature blue elephants in the distance, culminating in the stately arrival of a life-size elephant on the forestage, the slow, diagonal progression of the shadow of the globe across the set and the gradual descent of the globe being examples of some of the ways in which these questions were addressed