Benedict Cumberbatch’s wife and baby-mama Sophie Hunter gave an interview to the Guardian and while the interview itself isn’t so bad, the headline is worthy of a massive eye-roll: “Sophie Hunter: the opera director who has to dodge paparazzi.” Ah, yes. The Brits are so cultured that their opera directors are major celebrities, don’t you know? Of course it has nothing to do with the fact that she got knocked up by and then married to the thirstiest Oscar campaigner of the past two years. Anyway, The Guardian piece is about her work as an “opera director” and how she’s going to be doing a million things this summer, just after she gave birth to the Cumberbaby. Some highlights:

Sophie’s focus: “At the moment my focus is on opera and classical music,” said Hunter this weekend. The director and former performer is about to stage a unique immersive production of Benjamin Britten’s baroque-style cantata Phaedra, based on a translation of Racine’s tragedy and set near a deserted castle in Northern Ireland as part of Happy Days, the Samuel Beckett festival in Enniskillen.

She worked throughout her pregnancy and in the first weeks after the baby: “It has been a combination of music rehearsals in London and hard graft building in Enniskillen prior to the performance. It’s a very technical piece and it’s on a large scale, so the entire creative team are setting up camp in an equestrian arena to build it.”

Future plans: Later this year she is to mount an equally adventurous production of another Britten work, The Turn of the Screw, working again with Staples at Snape Maltings for Aldeburgh Music. “This time we are working with Aurora Orchestra,” she said, “but it’s another case of bringing a team of collaborators together from film, fine art, theatre and opera. We are writing the experience out there so we are heading out for a research residency at Snape. Until then it’s model boxes, meetings, poring over the music and the text and getting increasingly excited at the prospect of another Britten adventure.”

Her interest in avant-garde art: “Going on to train with Lecoq in Paris meant I discovered European theatre at a formative moment growing up. Seeing the work of directors like Romeo Castellucci, Ivo van Hove, Thomas Ostermeier, and Simon McBurney and Théâtre de Complicité, was, and continues to be, hugely important to me. To my mind these are artists who are forging new languages of performance and storytelling, and their constant reinvention is very inspiring.”

She loves the avant-garde art scene in NYC: Her own recent work in New York “in the context of a truly experimental and independent ‘downtown’ theatre scene” confirmed her path, she said. “New York was incredibly fulfilling and exciting.”

She doesn’t see a difference between her work and Benedict’s work: “My job now is to make work, to tell stories…There is still a critical need for a new audience and for new ways of thinking about the presentation and accessibility of opera and the concerts. The work I am making with [music director] Andrew Staples aims to shake up the status quo a bit. Taking the work out of the opera house and the concert hall is just the beginning.”

[From The Guardian]

I’ll admit it, I kind of glaze over when she’s talking about her art. It reminds me of her Vogue interview, where she went on and on about bringing some opera-theatre-directing-drama to her wedding or whatever. She always comes across as pretty pretentious, but whatever. Her relationship with Benedict has helped her career enormously and I guess Sophie is so amazing that she can do it all – be a wife, mother, successful avant-garde opera director AND be smug and pretentious in print interviews. She’s living the dream.

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