Pascoe Skips Over Stonehenge to Stage ‘Norma’ in 1831 Style

Productions of “Norma” often set the scene at Stonehenge with singers running around in togas. But don’t expect to see any of that in John Pascoe’s staging of Bellini’s Druid opera, which opens Saturday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

“Stonehenge is in England. ‘Norma’ is set in France--Gaul,” the British-born Pascoe said in a recent interview. “The first records we have of Druid practices (predate) Stonehenge by many thousands of years. (Stonehenge) has nothing to do with Druids at all.”

Besides, he added, “Bellini knew absolutely zip about Druids.”

For the Opera Pacific production, Pascoe has taken his cues from the original 1831 production instead of from later stagings.

“This will be an authentic production in terms of visual style--scenery, costumes and the temple. But it is not what people will expect when they come to a ‘Norma’ production. Usually, people do it in kind of rags, around 500 BC. That’s fine. But it is not what Bellini did, and not what I’m particularly interested in. . . . I’ve tried to be honest to what he thought.”

Pascoe said that the Opera Pacific program booklet will reproduce engravings of some of the original costumes and scenery that inspired Pascoe. Hence the run-down look of the temple. “One thing that we do know absolutely definitely about the Druids is that they didn’t have an architecture of stone,” Pascoe said. “They used natural phenomena or ruins as the focus for their rites.

Pascoe came to these ideas late, beginning his stage directing career only after designing sets and costumes for operas (beginning with Handel’s “Julius Caesar” for the English National Opera, with Dame Janet Baker, and conducted by Sir Charles MacKerras, in 1979).

Four years ago, however, the directing bug bit. “I thought I would like to see if I could direct,” he said.

For his first venture, he chose a situation that was “not too exposed”--Puccini’s “La Boheme” for the Northern Ireland Opera in Belfast in 1984. But the experience turned out to be “a baptism by fire” managing the busy stage traffic in the Cafe Momus scene.

But it was successful enough for him to go on to stage Handel’s “Solomon” for the Gottingen Handel Festival in Germany in 1984, Rameau’s comedy “Platee” at the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, S.C., in 1987 (transferred to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1988) and Donizetti’s “Anna Bolena” for Sutherland at the Royal Opera House in London in 1988.

Pascoe has not directed any of opera’s “big war horses,” though he hopes to. But when he does, he doesn’t envision radically reinterpreting them the way some better-known firebrands do to make them more “relevant.”

“If someone were to be hypercritical of the way opera productions have gone in the last 15 years, in some cases, a few directors will have come to an opera thinking, ‘Oh, God, what can I do with it?’ . . .

“I want to try to do what the music and the drama is calling out for. . . . One day, I would like to be considered the composer’s champion: If you want to do it as the composer writ, get Pascoe.”