Directing Verdi's Rigoletto: 'In this staging, my focus is on bodies in motion'

Irish National Opera's new production of Verdi’s Rigoletto opens in the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre on Sunday 1st December and runs until Saturday 7th December.

American baritone Michael Chioldi, just nominated for a Grammy for Best Opera Recording, sings Rigoletto - he will also sing the role for the Metropolitan Opera, New York in January, with high-wire soprano Soraya Mafi (whose heritage is part Irish, part Iranian) making her Irish debut as his daughter Gilda. The cast also includes Uzbekistan tenor Bekhzod Davronov and Irish mezzo-soprano Niamh O’Sullivan, with director Julian Chavaz and set designer Jamie Vartan reunited after INO’s highly-acclaimed production of Rossini’s William Tell.

Below, Julien Chavaz describes his approach to directing a Verdi masterpiece...

Rigoletto is a gripping tragedy: the story of a father mourning his daughter, swept away by power plays, unrestrained desires, and the missteps of his own love. Verdi immerses us in an obsessive and tormented fatherhood, where every note echoes the pain and powerlessness of the jester Rigoletto.

In this staging, my focus is on bodies in motion. For me, the stage is a space where every gesture, every movement must express as much as words or music. The singers, the chorus, become the lines and shapes from which the drama emerges. This physicality makes theatre vibrant, immediate—an art of the "now."

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The music of Rigoletto is mesmerizing, almost hypnotic, like a trance that transports us beyond time and space. Immersive, it envelops us, leading us into a flow where emotions and rhythms merge. I want the audience to be captured by this energy, swept into a movement where music and sensations intertwine.

The theatre is a rare space where emotions are alive, raw, and immediate.

Aesthetically, the idea is not to freeze the past or clumsily force the present but to recreate a poetic and extraordinary universe. A universe that can only exist within the theatre walls. Our question was this: What if we drew textures, motifs, silhouettes, and colours from the masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance - Titian, Caravaggio, Veronese - and reshaped them into a world where anything becomes possible?

Watch: Costume designer Jean-Jacques Delmotte talks Rigoletto

In this tapestry-draped realm, characters drift like puppets, lost like pawns on an immense chessboard. They become symbols of the human experience, universal and deeply resonant, inviting us to connect with them in a profound way.

The theatre is a rare space where emotions are alive, raw, and immediate. Rigoletto is an opera unlike any other, centring an outsider in its leading role. The poignant encounter between this tragic figure and the magic of the stage gives rise to something singular - a work that captures the audience’s spirit with a vision both familiar and entirely new.

Rigoletto is at the Bord Gais Energy Theatre from December 1st - 7th - find out more here.