Peabody Opera People | Roger Brunyate

Roger Brunyate

Design Work

Roger Brunyate writes:

“Although I am now a director by profession, my first work on stage was as a designer, when I was an assistant professor of Art History at the University of Glasgow in the mid-sixties. At that time, I was designing rather literary plays such as Love’s Labours Lost (Shakespeare), Phaedra (Racine/Lowell), The Cocktail Party (T. S. Eliot), and ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (Ford). But this experience, together with my burgeoning interest in directing and love of music, soon seduced me away from academic research, and I entered the theatre professionally as an opera director after four and a half years of teaching.

Since then, my design work has diminished as my directing has increased, although I have designed such productions as Il trovatore (Florida State Opera), La traviata (Whitewater Opera), Savitri (The Library of Congress), and Iolanta (Baltimore Symphony). I have also designed The Yeomen of the Guard and several other Gilbert and Sullivan productions for the Young Victorian Theatre in Baltimore.

My Peabody Opera Theatre designs have included L’incoronazione di Poppea, L’Ormindo, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte (twice), A Little Night Music, and most recently Le nozze di Figaro. More frequently, I find myself taking on our smaller-scale productions at Theatre Project and elsewhere, such as Hotel Eden, Berlin/Munich, The Threepenny Opera, and the opera étude program Contrafact, Contrafiction. Many of these have involved collage images projected as part of the set, and indeed the major part of my design work now has been devoted to similar graphics for the present website.”