Christopher Tonkin

What makes Don Giovanni one of opera's most complex roles?

As an artist we have to create a multi-dimensional character within a context that is very often seen as very black and white.

Don Giovanni is a womaniser, he is power hungry, he is misogynistic, he will rape, take and run. This is all true. But we need to provide areas of grey, areas of humanity within him, otherwise the experience for the audience is a very dead one.

Without that, you find within the first ten minutes of the opera what it's actually all about, and you may as well pack up and go home. So, finding moments where that façade, that veneer is broken (as it is the last 48hrs of his life) that's what we're working toward. The mechanisms, the well-oiled show that he has been able to put on for so long, is finally breaking down. We want to be able to show that all crumbling.

What surprised you most when preparing this role?

I performed this role 21 years ago, and what surprised me is that I remember almost none of it. I think that's partly because we did it in English when I performed it with Melbourne Opera for the first time, but also because my approach to Giovanni has completely changed.

He is so much more of a complex character than I originally played him. The experience of all of those years, not just as a performer but also as a person growing and changing, seeing beneath the mechanisms of life and the world we live in, has really helped me to understand a character like this much more deeply. That dark side that all of us have, our shadow, and being able to understand why someone might be like that.

Don Giovanni is a man who abuses power, manipulates women, and faces no consequences until the very last moment — and even then, only supernatural ones. Suzanne has been clear this production does not romanticise him. In a world where that story still plays out in real life, what responsibility does a performer have when inhabiting a character like this?

The society we live in is set up to reward power, dominance, control. For someone like Don Giovanni, a Duke, it comes from a system where wealth and power trickle down from very few to the rest of us, who are essentially pawns. We can see it in politics today: there are people in power whose actions carry no consequences.

When they were raised in such an entitled manner that they were given a false sense of what it is to be human, what we all truly need is real connection, intimacy, love, and a feeling of unconditional acceptance. If you're at the top of that pyramid, which is built on dominant structures, capitalist structures, patriarchal structures, then it's likely that person has a very warped sense of reality. And they're also missing out on what they truly need on the inside. So they will get whatever they want externally, and that is all unconscious, of course.

You can see through the opera that in these last 48 hours he is baffled, because all of a sudden there are consequences for his actions, and it's all happening at once. He has killed somebody and thinks he can just shrug that off. Right to the very end he is just like, no, this doesn't mean anything, I haven't done anything wrong, I'm just living my life. And then it's literally the last minute of a three-hour opera where he finally goes, "oh, actually", and it's too late.

I think the reason he has had over a thousand women is because the intimacy he is looking for, he thinks he's going to find it in the next one. He probably does fall for each one of them. But he's searching for something that cannot be found the way he is looking for it.

My responsibility is to be able to gather all of that and present it in a metabolised way, integrated into the text, into the music, in a way that is visceral for an audience. Not only do you have to sing the whole thing, remember the text, give a good reading, you have to express it in a way that hits them directly in the solar plexus, or reaches them up in the back row of the balcony. It takes many years to develop that ability. It's what I love. It's why I do what I do.

Why does Don Giovanni still resonate, and what do you hope audiences take from this production?

We're still dealing with the same patriarchal, dominance-based, hierarchical structures today as Mozart was in his time. And that is what Giovanni represents, that tiny fraction of humanity for whom the system works, while the rest of us are constrained by it. That's why something like Don Giovanni is so powerful, and why it feels so urgent to be putting it on right now.

For some people it will be visceral anger at the injustices, and we need that. It may also trigger something in their own lives: abuse of power, gaslighting, narcissism, the shame we put on ourselves thinking things were our fault when we were completely disempowered. The ability to hold people to account, and to have compassion for ourselves when we wish we'd done things differently.

But it's often not just an individual, it's the system we're living in. Patriarchy does not work. Capitalism does not work. Growth for growth's sake does not work. If you look at nature, it grows, it maintains, and then it decays. That decay becomes compost for new growth. We need those cycles. If there's no decay it will be forced upon us by nature, and it will be a much more violent destruction. Giovanni is at the top of a structure that does not benefit life, not most of us, and ultimately not even him.

Describe Don Giovanni in three words.

Entitled, Disconnected, Searching.