‘Hamlet really wasn’t an easy place to be’
Returning to Glyndebourne in ‘Saul’, tenor Allan Clayton tells Rupert Christiansen how last year’s stellar performance laid him low
It’s nearly 10 years since I first interviewed the tenor Allan Clayton – then a fresh-faced graduate from the Royal Academy of Music who had just made significant debuts at Wigmore Hall and Glyndebourne. He was warm, funny, smart and unguarded, and I found him instantly likeable, but our hour chatting together left me wondering how someone of his easy-going nature would fare in a cruel and demanding business.
A decade on, at the age of 37, he’s more than fulfilled his promise, and his steadily burgeoning international career on stage and the concert platform was honoured in May with the Royal Philharmonic Society’s prestigious award for best singer of 2017 – the citation singling out his impassioned portrayal of Hamlet in Brett Dean’s new opera at Glyndebourne.
It’s a role specially written for him, and one to which he will return when the production moves to the US (the date and location as yet under wraps). He admits to feeling “a bit possessive” about the work, but it wasn’t plain sailing: learning and performing this exigent music and inhabiting that complex character over six months was an experience he found gruelling, if not shattering.
“Of course, it was absolutely wonderful in so many ways, and it seems to have made a real difference to what I’m being offered, but it also had a terrible effect on me. My father died when I was younger, I have a dysfunctional relationship with my mother and I broke up with my girlfriend during rehearsals, so an awful lot of difficult stuff got drawn on and dredged up. Hamlet really isn’t an easy place to be, I can tell you, and when it was all over, I had a sort of collapse. I was in the taxi to the airport, on my way to Eugene Onegin in Frankfurt, when I realised I just couldn’t do it – I was totally exhausted, mentally and physically, and I had to cancel, which I hated doing.”
Perhaps Clayton isn’t as smilingly straightforward as he seems. Martha Argerich once said that she loved playing the piano, but hated being a pianist, and Clayton recognises the same divide in his own attitude to his art. “Of course, you have to take what you do seriously, otherwise it would be no good. But I do feel some people get awfully pretentious and haughty about it all. I always have in the back of my mind something a friend of mine says – ‘it’s only dressing up and singing songs in a room’.”
So he refuses to play the game by the normal rules – he dresses very causally, to put it politely, sporting sagging jeans, 10-for-a-fiver T-shirts, and facial hair worthy of Worzel Gummidge. His Twitter handle @fatboyclayton is defiant, and he used it to retaliate with a sharp four-letter expletive a couple of years ago when a newspaper critic dared to comment on his girth in a review of his role as the noble Prince Tamino in The Magic Flute at ENO.
“He was quite rude, but I suppose he had a point and was just doing his job,” Clayton says, ruefully. “I don’t read reviews, but someone posted this one on my stream, and I spotted it when I was drunk. I know I overreacted. I should have kept my mouth shut. If I ever meet this man I shall apologise to him.”
Clayton would love to be leading what passes for a normal life. “Don’t get me wrong, I love what I do and think I’m very lucky to be doing it. But I don’t see why being a classical singer should mean that I have to submerge part of my personality.” A particular bugbear is the amount of travel he’s obliged to endure – “I want to have a family, and I can’t see a way to do that, given the way things are now.” In the autumn, he’ll be based in Berlin, preparing for the title role in a new production of Bernstein’s Candide and “vegging out in the evenings on box sets and Netflix”. He doesn’t altogether look forward to that.
His home is a rented house in Lewes (“I still can’t afford to buy anywhere”), and one reason he enjoys Glyndebourne so much – and is happy this year to accept the subsidiary role of Jonathan in the revival of Handel’s Saul – is that it gives him the opportunity to stay put and indulge in his armchair passion for sport. “Football crazy”, he’s an ardent fan of Liverpool, and gets enormous pleasure from a text message group he shares with other Kopite singers such as his chums Iestyn Davies and David Butt Philip.
But it’s cricketers with whom he identifies psychologically – “Like singers, they are under this mental pressure to perform out there on their own, totally exposed and yet also responsible to a team,” he says. “No wonder so many of them are suicidal.” If he’d continued with social anthropology, which he read at Cambridge, it’s a subject he would have liked to have researched.
None of his doubts and qualms should lead one to think that Clayton is anything other than a wonderful musician and performer, who gives it his all. Significantly, he has no teacher or mentor serving as a “second pair of ears”, but as he approaches 40, he is at a vocal crossroads, where he is in need of sound advice. His voice has recently expanded in range and volume to the point at which he could move away from lighter Mozartian and baroque repertory, in which he made his name, towards darker and more romantic
‘I want to have a family, and I can’t see a way to do that, given the way things are now’
territory. But where might that lead?
He was, for instance, very impressive as David in Meistersinger at Covent Garden last year, but doesn’t feel drawn to heavier Wagnerian roles such as Walther in the same opera or Lohengrin – “I’m wary. You need so much stamina.” Yet something even more emotionally draining is on the cards – Britten’s Peter Grimes, the sexually tortured fisherman, which “I’ll do in about three years’ time”. He’ll also be back at Glyndebourne next season to sing the technically demanding title role in Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust.
What it boils down to is that Clayton has his own way of doing things: without being remotely selfimportant, he doesn’t want to be pushed around or read the rule book, and perhaps this fierce independence is what gives his singing its shining edge and vitality. “Before a show, I never warm up,” he says. “I always like to conserve my energies by coming to the theatre at the last possible moment, and then just getting in there and doing it and getting out again. So, from that point of view, I really love matinees: all over in time to go home