Glyndebourne is an opera house in the UK, known for its world-class productions and magnificent location in a six-hundred-year-old country house. Each year, it delivers performances to some 150,000 people across a summer festival and autumn season. This summer, we had the great pleasure of meeting Glyndebourne's Technical Director and NTS graduate, Éric Gautron (Creation and Production, 2003), to talk about his career and find out how this Franco-Manitoban ended up in the heart of the Sussex countryside.

What is your role at Glyndebourne? What does a technical director do?

I get this question a lot. The best way I've found to answer it is that, when you come to see the opera, everything to do with the singers or the musicians and everything to do with the music—I have nothing to do with that. I'm ultimately responsible for the rest: sets, costumes, props, makeup, wigs, all special effects, lighting, video, sound, everything. That's about it.

 

Wow, that's a big job. What are your specific responsibilities?

My responsibilities can be broken down into four parts:

  • There's the element of producing the shows, so making sure the set construction goes ahead, but it's not me directly who's with the workshop. There are two production managers. In opera and in the UK, there's an inversion in the titles of technical director and production director compared to Canada. Technical direction in an opera house remains very technical element, but there's also a production management side, as executive producer, which plays a bigger part.
  • To deliver the show technically.
  • Contract management. I'm responsible for all contracts for the entire creative team. Everyone except the singers and musicians. The actors, dancers, acrobats if any, all the technical crew.
  • Since we have a building, we have a theatre, we have workshops, responsibility for the infrastructure falls under my purview.

At the height of the festival, there are 300 people working in the technical and production department here at Glyndebourne. I have team leaders who are incredible. What I do is bring all the different teams together to focus on a production.

 

Can you describe a typical day?

No, there’s no such thing!

Still, there’s a certain routine every day: we're a repertory opera house, so we rehearse one show in the morning, change sets and costumes and everything in the afternoon, and perform another show in front of an audience in the evening. At night, another team comes in to change the set on stage for a rehearsal starting the next morning, and we rehearse non-stop for the four months of the festival.     

 

What was your career path to get here?

I graduated from the National Theatre School in 2003. I did a few freelance projects with Catherine La Frenière (Director of the Création et production program). And then I found myself at Quat'Sous as technical director and production manager. I worked at Quat'Sous for three years. And then Louise Roussel, who was working for Ex Machina at the time, came to talk to me about the Andersen project, which was going on tour, and asked me if I wanted to join the Ex Machina team. So I did.

I worked for Ex Machina for quite a long time on several different tours and projects. Eventually, I found myself working on opera projects with Michel Gosselin, as his assistant. Robert Lepage's famous Ring Cycle ended up at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. I worked on that, and we delivered the show to the Met.

Back at the Met, I was offered a position as technical director. I couldn't turn that down. I mean, you don't refuse these things. I worked at the Met for almost five years, and I moved from the Met to Glyndebourne in a very natural way. I've been here at Glyndebourne since 2016.

We're going to see the dress rehearsal for A Midsummer Night's Dream today. What was the biggest challenge in this production?

The biggest challenge is that we're in a repertory opera house, so we have shows that go back a long way. This production of A Midsummer Night's Dream was first produced here at Glyndebourne in 1982, and it's still the same production we present. The biggest challenge is to take a production that we know very well, that was created in a certain era, and continue to develop the show so that we can produce it safely while keeping the magic alive. That's one of the greatest challenges.

So, we decided to have a child actor play Puck. In the show, in the 1982 staging and still today, there are several aerial flights by this child. In 1982, we did it one way. As you can imagine, we don't do it that way anymore. To translate this effect for modern safety standards, without losing the magic, is one of the biggest challenges as well as one of the most interesting. Preserving the magic.  

How did your studies at the National Theatre School bring you to where you are today? What did you learn at NTS that you still use in your work?

Everything. Everything I learned at the School is still useful to me today. That's easy to say. It's not promotion. I’m not paid to say this, but it's true. The School allows each individual to develop as much as they should or as much as they want. The School connects young newcomers with the old guard, if you can call them that. The School's intense networking is extremely useful, and still serves me well today.  There's experience, there's skills, there's an intelligence that you can tap into quickly and frequently.  

One of the best things I learned at the School is that it's up to us to deliver these projects, it's up to us to drive them forward. Whatever the structure, whatever the size of the teams we manage, it's up to us to bring passion to these projects.

There's a wonderful anecdote. I remember we had a project where things weren't going very well. I can't remember what role I was doing, but let's imagine I was production manager. It wasn't going very well, and I called Michel Granger (Création et production, 1993). I'll remember it for the rest of my life: I asked him What do I do? What should I do? And Michel laughed in my face (over the phone), with his wonderful laugh, and said: Hah! But what are you going to do? Great question. And he hung up on me.

Don't get me wrong, it's wonderful. It was the most important moment for me, because that's when I realized Aha! I have a responsibility and I can either take it or not take it. That's one of the biggest lessons I learned at the School. And it doesn't just apply to production, it applies to life. Michel Granger, thank you.

 

What advice do you have for a young person who would like to work in production or who is thinking of enrolling at in the Production program at NTS?

Go ahead, do it. This is an extremely vast field and one that continues to evolve. There's no such thing as a boring day. Some days are less interesting than others, that's for sure, but there's always something to learn, there's always something exciting. We take part in shows, in events that are incredible, that transform the world, that have an impact on people. Just go for it. There are so many opportunities. 

I think the School is one of the best in the world. The reality of working and doing, and spending less time in a lecture trying to understand the theory (which is still an important element), but actually doing the thing, working on the productions, understanding what it means to be in the theatre, is extremely important. You learn so much about yourself and what you love in this profession by doing it, and by having the chance to do it safely. You can make mistakes. Having the chance to make mistakes is magnificent. The School allowed me to do that, and it still has an impact on me today.

Header image: © Glyndebourne Productions Ltd. Photo: Tristram Kenton