Alongisde his singing engagements, Benjamin works as a stage director, producer and librettist.
June 2024
Entrez dans la Légende
L. Elbaz
Dôme de Marseille, France
Musical Marseille
Stage Director: Valery Rodriguez
Associate Director: Benjamin Schilperoort
Lighting Designer: Jacques Rouveyrollis
Musical Director: Sébastien Boin
July 2023
The Magic Flute
W.A Mozart
Clonter Opera, UK
Stage Director: Michael McCaffery
Associate Director: Benjamin Schilperoort
Designer: Jessica Staton
Lighting Designer: Pablo Fernandez Baz
Musical Director: Philip Sunderland
Oct 2022
The Telephone/La Voix Humaine
G.C. Menotti/F. Poulenc
Opera on the Move
The Playground Theatre, London
Stage Director: Benjamin Schilperoort
Designer: Fiona McKeon
Lighting Designer: Hugo Dodsworth
Musical Director: Satoshi Kubo
2021
Lenya-Lenya
Play by Benjamin Schilperoort
Music by Kurt Weill
Opera on the Move
Stage Director: Benjamin Schilperoort
Lenya: Kristy Swift
Weill: Richard Rittelmann
Voice: Emilie Cavallo
2019-2020
Così fan tutte
W.A. Mozart
Libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte
Opera on the Move
Stage Director: Benjamin Schilperoort
Music Director: Emil Duncumb
2019
Pelléas et Mélisande
C. Debussy
Libretto by Maurice Maeterlinck
Opera on the Move
Producer
My role involved coordinating a world premiere of a musical theatre piece based on the music of Beethoven, timed to coincide with the 2024 Olympic Games, and involving over 300 performers and a large range of artistic collaborators. I directed a handful of the scenes while the director was away, and I coached the performers over a period of 8 months.
Due to this production’s expedited rehearsal process, I contributed not only by supporting the stage director conventionally, but also by directing many of the scenes and running the dialogue and movement sessions. The show was the first at Clonter Opera to use projection, and we exploited it, along with sculpted lighting, to create a stark and thrilling visual world.
I staged a double bill of two operas that focus on technology and the limits of human connection. In The Telephone, the design and the staging were influenced by German expressionism and the physicality of telephone wires and switchboards. In La Voix Humaine, we used the same set and referenced expressionism’s descendent, film noir, creating a darker and more austere landscape of flickering lights and hallucinations.
I wrote Lenya-Lenya to create a piece of theatre which could be rehearsed during the covid-19 pandemic. The show only required three singers, a pianist, and me. I was also interested in writing something which explored all the dualities and contradictions of Lotte Lenya’s life. The result was a 90-minute musical theatre piece using the compositions of her partner Kurt Weill. The show makes a case for Lenya’s overlooked role as the inspiration and co-creator of many of Weill’s compositions, as well as her extraordinary identity as an avant-garde queer performer in a straight-laced age.
I created a staging concept for Così fan tutte which incorporated live improvisation, so that every night the staging was completely different. The set and costumes would be changed before the show without giving the performers time to familiarise themselves. The rehearsal process involved 3 weeks of intensive training in improvisation techniques.
I founded Opera on the Move in 2018 to stage a rarely-performed opera, Peter Brook’s adaptation of Pelléas et Mélisande. We put it on at the Playground Theatre in London, a venue where opera had never been performed before. The show gave the company a reputation for creating bold, immersive and unusual work. I spent four years as the artistic director of the company.