Brittany Smith’s gut-wrenching ‘Lucia di Lammermoor’ faces her demons

I meet Brittany Smith at the airport — an appropriate location for our interview, given that the opera diva has spent much of 2024 shuttling between cities, rehearsal studios and theatres around the country. She is currently preparing to open Cape Town Opera’s production of Lucia di Lammermoor at the Joburg Theatre on July 25. Over coffee, we chat about how she manages the physical and psychological demands of singing the part of the tormented title character.

As Lucia, she appears in the famous “mad scene” in a bloodied wedding gown, having just stabbed a man she was forced to marry — before being killed herself. Offstage, Smith keeps it light, making lots of jokes with her fellow cast members to counterbalance the emotional intensity onstage. She keeps regular appointments with her therapist to ensure a clear line is maintained between performer and character. As it happens, she is also planning a wedding; she will be getting married a few weeks after the conclusion of the Johannesburg run.

While the comparisons end there, Smith is deeply invested in her character’s experience. In taking on the role, she sought to redeem Lucia from the cliché of the “damsel in distress”. The hysterical or even violently insane female figure is a well-worn trope in Western classics of page and stage, from Ophelia in Hamlet to Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, but Smith wanted to know: “What motivates Lucia? Who is she really, beyond her family tree, beyond what all the men around her say?”

This production of Lucia di Lammermoor, directed by Cape Town Opera co-founder Angelo Gobbato to mark the company’s 25th anniversary, makes a bold departure in its interpretation of Gaetano Donizetti’s tragic opera. The composer and his librettist, Salvadore Cammarano, were inspired to produce an Italian-Scottish mash-up by Walter Scott’s novel The Bride of Lammermoor at a time when enthusiasm for the romance of the highlands was sweeping Europe. It is a familiar tale of forbidden love: Lucia’s brother Enrico Ashton (performed here by Conroy Scott) is the sworn enemy of her lover Edgardo Ravenswood (Lukhanyo Moyake).

When Smith suggested to Gobbato that Lucia may be pregnant with Edgardo’s baby, this spurred a radical rethinking of the “unwritten” plot that might lie beneath Cammarano’s 1835 libretto. The result is a darker, more gruesome story, but also one that eschews the melodrama often associated with opera. Dispensing with unconvincing gestures towards historical realism — “We don’t need to dress South Africans in tartan kilts,” as Smith puts it — this production instead emphasises psychological realism.

“Lucia knows her mind, even though she is mentally instable,” Smith insists. On the one hand, this Lucia is schizophrenic, making her distrustful of her own perceptions; on the other hand, notwithstanding her delusions, she faces the grim reality of a patriarchal society in which she has no individual agency. Smith’s conviction that we should not shy away from candid discussions about mental health stems from her own struggles with depression and anxiety. “Things can’t always be pretty on stage,” she adds, referencing the conventional pageantry of opera. “Sometimes we have to show the ugly, and allow people to face their demons.”

This commitment to understanding Lucia’s psyche pays off musically. The mad scene, in particular, is a tour de force that will move opera afficionados and novices in the audience alike. Dumbing it down for an ignoramus like me, Smith explains how the effect is achieved: “We hear the flute, she feels the kick of her unborn child — it’s beautiful, but then she delivers that high E flat as a scream of frustration.”

The impetus for a more authentic acting performance, “solidifying a character” rather than singing as a caricature, also comes from Smith extending herself beyond opera to other theatrical genres like musicals. Earlier in 2024, audiences raved about her depiction of Maria in the Pieter Toerien/Cape Town Opera revival of The Sound of Music, and in December a similar co-production will allow her to reprise another much-loved musical role: Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady.

“I like being a jack of all trades,” she affirms, “and I think every opera performer can benefit from trying to develop as a triple-threat musical performer. You need to approach it with humility and have a strong work ethic, as with any rehearsal process. But having an operatic singing technique does help with longevity, as you can avoid the vocal strain that usually comes with singing night after night.”

Smith notes that a lot of older musicals were written operatically — a reminder of the tradition that connects the two forms via light opera and operetta. Before Smith encountered opera, she had developed a love of musicals as a child. My Fair Lady is close to her heart because she can relate to the class (and, in SA, race) politics of pronunciation. Eliza is a Cockney flower seller who climbs the social ranks of Edwardian London by learning how to “speak proper”; as a coloured person, Smith knows all too well the stigma attached to accents in SA. “I get it every time I try to book an appointment or a restaurant table over the phone,” she laughs.

What other musical roles await Smith in future? She is drawn to Christine from Phantom and Fantine from Les Mis — both women who tend to be misrepresented as “weak” but who are not mere “passive victims”: “They have some essence of stubbornness and determination. They are strong-willed.” These are traits that Smith identifies in herself.

For now, however, her attention is focused on opera. “It’s always exciting to sing for Johannesburg audiences,” she tells me, “and there is a real appetite for opera in this city, among people of all ages”. Recalling the reception of Cape Town Opera’s production of Tosca when it toured to Johannesburg in 2023, Smith asserts the company’s desire — in the absence of a national opera — to take opera around the country.

“Our success as Cape Town Opera depends in large part on the formal support we get from the City of Cape Town,” acknowledges Smith, adding: “There’s no question that enabling the arts is a question of political will. Hopefully in the next few years the authorities in Johannesburg and other major cities will do more for the performing arts too.”

And at national level? Smith declines to comment on prospects under the new minister of sport, arts and culture. But she would like to see artists treated with the same respect as sports stars. “Artists are athletes — opera in particular takes a huge physical toll on the body.” So opera singers require physiotherapists, visits to the ENT and more: “We need better medical aid than professional sportspeople!”

If this seems like rhetorical licence, go watch Smith’s Lucia. It is an enormous psycho-physical undertaking, and it is carried off with aplomb. There is operatic spectacle aplenty, and the musical feat is astounding. It is also gut-wrenching, even terrifying, yet ultimately elevating. As an audience member sitting behind me declared at the end of the Cape Town première: “That was so hectic!”

Johannesburg audiences won’t want to miss this one.

• ‘Lucia di Lammermoor’ is at The Mandela at Joburg Theatre from July 25-28. 

This story originally appeared in Business Day.