The Phantom of the Opera
by Gaston Leroux
adapted by Malcolm Brown
In the darkest depths beneath the Paris Opera House lurks the mysterious, masked Phantom.
His desperate desire for love fuels his obsession with the beautiful, young singer,
Christine Daae, and drives him to commit blackmail, kidnap and murder to achieve his ends.
I had always been fascinated by the Beauty and the Beast story of the
Phantom of the Opera, and decided to try to dramatise it to perform with the drama group for
which I had been directing plays for so many years. The story had been adapted
many times as a film, and, perhaps most famously, as a musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber.
I returned to the original novel, and found that there was plenty of material which
would work splendidly as a melodrama, with its mixture of comedy, horror and tragedy.
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In researching the background to the story and the author I was fascinated to learn
that Leroux incorporated quite a lot of real events and places into his fictional tale.
There was indeed a lake deep beneath the stage area of the Paris Opera, and its water was used to
power the hydraulic stage machinery. Building was halted in 1870 with the outbreak of the
Franco-Prussian war, and the unfinished building was used as an observation post, communication
centre, powder store and military prison. Perhaps it was in this period that the idea that
the Opera was haunted by tormented spirits came into being.
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"The Phantom of the Opera" Set Model
The gala opening of the Opera in 1875 signalled the renaissance of Paris and heralded the
beginning of La Belle Epoque - a period of elegance, excitement and high living.
The Opera house covers a site of nearly three acres, and is seventeen stories high, with seven
of them below ground level. Suspended in the centre of the auditorium is an ornate chandelier
- seven tons of metal-work and glass. In 1896 a steel hawser holding one of its counterweights
burned trough in an electrical fire, the weight broke, smashed through the ceiling and a
woman was crushed to death by the debris.
Gaston Leroux was born in Paris in 1868. A star pupil at school, he frequently won prizes for
his academic ability, and in 1889 he gained a degree in law. In the same year his father died,
leaving him a million francs, which he rapidly squandered on drink, gambling and ill-considered speculations.
Unhappy with the legal profession, he successfully applied for a journalist post with L'Echo de Paris.
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Soon after, Le Matin offered him a more prestigious and lucrative position as a
roving correspondent. Leroux travelled far and wide, across Europe, Russia, Asia and Africa.
He frequently adopted disguises to get a good story and witnessed some of the greatest
historical events of the period. In 1907, however, he gave up his journalistic travels to become
a full-time novelist.
His narrative in The Phantom of the Opera is in the journalistic style, and as a result
of the blurring of fact and fiction, it appears almost to be a documentary. He begins: "The Opera Ghost
really existed, He was not, as was long believed, a creature of the imagination ..."
More photographs from this production can be found on the Russian website Operaghost.ru
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ACT ONE, Scenes 1 to 5
ACT ONE, Scenes 6 to 13
ACT TWO
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