Why I’ve made a Yorkshire version of t’Barber of Seville

The seeds of my adaptation of The Barber of Seville into Yorkshire dialect were sown a long time ago; like dialect itself, they have a long history. I spent quite a lot of the early part of 2023 trudging up to the little bedroom in our house to work on Yorkshireising (a word I just made up) the libretto from various existing standard English versions, but the project probably begins in the mid-1960s in my Uncle Charlie’s front room on North Street a few hundred yards from the aforementioned Little Bedroom. I am sitting on his dark brown settee eating cold baked beans straight from the can and he is listening to some opera on the radio and he points to the speaker of his radiogram and says, in a voice poised uneasily between awe and celebration “That kid can sing. He can sing.” 

My auntie, bustling in from the kitchen with some treacle sandwiches, isn’t so sure ‘That’s a bit of a row!’ she says, and Uncle Charlie shakes his head vigorously, almost dislodging his flat cap. “Music hath charms!” she almost shouts, sarcastically, and then she deals the killer blow: ‘He wouldn’t get into Houghton Main Male Voice Choir!’ Uncle Charlie chews his treacle sandwich with an unidentifiable expression on his worn face. 

I didn’t know it at the time but that exchange exemplified the kind of high art/low art split that I’ve been thinking about in one way or another since I began to write for a living. Would that opera singer on the wireless, with his classical training, have made it into any of the local choirs that were packed with men who had just come out of the pit and had their tea before rehearsal in the church hall? The answer, quite often, is no, for reasons that I’m still wrestling with.

Another seed of my Yorkshire Barber of Seville was an opera called The Day The Earth Trembled, performed in the summer of 1994 in the yard of Hickleton Main Colliery near Barnsley; it told the story of the 1943 Barnburgh Main pit disaster and featured local choirs, Grimethorpe Colliery Band and groups of professional singers. It’s almost forgotten now, both locally and nationally, but at the time it made a huge impact and when I saw it, it made me begin to think harder about opera and Yorkshire dialect and whether the two could marry, or at least have a series of dates. One vivid memory of the opera was a singer with a huge and powerful voice belting out “Don’t go down’t pit!” and a man sitting next to me at the open air show turning to his mate and saying “He’s not from round here”. His mate, who looked quite a lot like Uncle Charlie, nodded. “He can sing though,” he said. “He can that,” replied the first man, almost echoing Charlie’s words. They both knew, as I did, that the ‘t’ in ‘down’t pit’ is never actually said (or sung). It’s a ghost of a sound, a suggestion of a letter, a trap for the unwary person trying to sound like they come from Yorkshire. 

That exchange is central to the question of whether the clipped Yorkshire vowels could hold the long operatic note; could it be done without sounding unintentionally comic or Faux Yorkshire? After all, as the great Leeds poet Tony Harrison wrote, we’re the ones Shakespeare gives the comedy parts to. In 2017 I collaborated with the brilliant Salford-based composer Alan Williams on an opera called The Arsonists, set in Grimethorpe a few miles from where I live, just to see if a fruitful meeting of these two modes of language could be conjured up. I would write the words and then record them, speaking them in my voice, inhabiting them with my rhythms and then the singers would do their very best with them and it worked to a great extent when it was performed with professional singers and members of the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and it fired me up to make more Yorkshire-inflected operas.

In my deep dialect dive I also brought up some interesting flotsam about general attitudes to opera; I personally think that it’s a marvellous form that’s just right for our shouty and turbulent times. Like country music, it wears its heart on its sleeve and it’s not afraid to show huge emotions of the kind we’re all familiar with. It has plot and character and music and spectacle and sometimes tunes you can go out humming; a lot of people, however, share my Auntie’s view that it’s a bit of a row, and not only that, it’s a bit of a row for besuited and jewelled toffs to enjoy in the company of other besuited and jewelled toffs. It is seen as being so far away from the experience of most of us that most of us can happily ignore it. I disagree with that so maybe, just maybe, an opera sung in the way people talk round here, wherever round here happens to be, might go a little way to shaking the foundations of those perceptions.

Which brings me to the little bedroom and The Barber of Seville. In 2019 I was asked by a group that have coalesced into the Bradford Opera Festival, to have a go at translating a few extracts from the piece. I’d previously worked with them on an opera set on a couple of ice cream vans so I knew they didn’t lack imagination and commitment, so I said yes. In the halcyon pre-Covid days we put together a taster of what would become, we hoped, a finished full-length opera and it worked spectacularly, the words fitting the tune like melodic gloves.

Then the pandemic happened in all its operatic horror and I have to admit that I thought the project had bitten the dust but then, wonderfully, new life was breathed into it and the task of translating the whole thing began, bringing its own problems and opportunities.

The show has ended up being set in sort of gleaming Bradford of the Mind, in 1969, with the idea being that Figaro has moved from Seville to Bradford, presumably because it’s going to be City of Culture in 2025; the singers will be in costume but we can’t afford a set. They will, however, be singing in front of an orchestra so that we can see them rather than glimpsing the tops of their heads in the pit. The plan is that my next translation will be The Marriage of Figaro, and that will be set in 1972 and then the third of the trilogy, The Guilty Mother, will be set in 1992, following the sexual and social upheaval of those decades. 

I’ve written a number of libretti in the past but because the music was new the words were new too and the two forms found ways to accommodate each other over the drafting process. With The Barber of Seville the tunes, not to put too fine a point on it, were already sung and the words were already there, and we were working with the existing plot. So the task of translation becomes thrillingly precise and technical. The words have to fit the tune exactly. The little bedroom witnessed scenes of furrowed brow frustration as I realised that I didn’t have enough syllables to make that gag work, or that if I took a word away to mirror a Yorkshire rhythm then the whole sentence would collapse. 

The little bedroom also witnessed scenes of unalloyed joy when a line clicked into place in a way that sounded like my Uncle Charlie was singing it. I think he’d have enjoyed the outcome; come along and see for yourself in Bradford next week. And then let’s make translations of The Barber of Seville into any and every dialect. Except Lancashire, obvs.

The Barber of Seville is at St George’s Hall, Bradford, on Thursday November 23. Tickets: bradford-theatres.co.uk