35 years of Yllana. 30 years of the Peacock. Joseph O’Curneen talks Opera Locos!

“We like to say, even from the very beginning, that this is opera without the boring bits.”

It is a mission statement delivered with a chuckle, but make no mistake: Joseph O’Curneen, co-artistic director of the legendary Spanish theatre company Yllana, is deadly serious about the business of being funny. When The Opera Locos explodes onto the stage at Sadler’s Wells’s West End outpost, The Peacock, this February, it will not be one more spectacular touring production rolling into London. It marks the triumphant return of a company that has spent over three decades perfecting a very specific, very difficult alchemy: the marriage of high art and crowd-pleasing comedy.

It is also a return with a distinct sense of occasion. As The Peacock celebrates its 30th anniversary as the West End home of Sadler’s Wells, Yllana’s presence feels less like a guest spot and more like a spiritual homecoming. The venue, with its eclectic history of populist entertainment—from the days of “singing ducks” and aquatic spectacles to its current status as the engine room of commercial dance—is the perfect playground for O’Curneen’s brand of anarchy.

“We are delighted with the chance, once again, to perform at the Peacock theatre,” O’Curneen says, acknowledging the venue’s significance during this milestone season. “Thanks to the Sadler’s Wells team for making it happen. We are thrilled to be back.”

Merging Masterpieces with Mayhem

For thirty-five years, Yllana has been dismantling the sacred cows of culture with the precision of a surgeon and the subtlety of a slapstick clown. As they prepare to bring their award-winning comic opera back to London, O’Curneen reflects on a journey that has taken them from the post-Franco explosion of Madrid to the global stage, all while refusing to speak a single intelligible word.

“Yllana is in essence a physical comedy theatre company,” O’Curneen explains, tracing the lineage of a troupe that has become a global brand. “We’ve been in the business now for about thirty-five years, and we’re always looking for sources of inspiration. We look into the various genres to see if they inspire us, to find whether or not two apparently antagonistic genres can coexist.”

“Yllana is in essence a physical comedy theatre company,” O’Curneen explains, tracing the lineage of a troupe that has become a global brand. “We’ve been in the business now for about thirty-five years, and we’re always looking for sources of inspiration.”

Joseph O’Curneen

This search for “antagonistic genres” is the engine room of Yllana’s longevity. It is a creative restlessness that refuses to let the company settle into a comfortable rhythm. They have tackled everything from westerns to sci-fi, but it is in the hallowed halls of classical music where they have found some of their most fertile ground. Before The Opera Locos, there was PaGAGnini, a string quartet show that proved classical virtuosity and physical comedy were not mutually exclusive.

“We inserted the word ‘Gag’ into Paganini to create PaGAGnini,” O’Curneen says. “It was high-quality performance, but using physical theatre—clown antics—to create humour. That travelled around the world, and so we started to look into opera and the arias. We felt that we could create a similar experience, obviously cherry-picking the best arias and creating a storyline for our show.”

This isn’t a small, localised experiment, either. Yllana has scaled this specific brand of madness into a global franchise. “We’re now in the midst of a new production in Buenos Aires in April,” O’Curneen notes casually. “So we’re gonna have about three or four productions running at the same time.” It is a testament to the fact that while languages barrier, a pratfall in C-Major lands in any hemisphere.

The Virtuosity Behind the Vaudeville

The result is a show that feels custom-built to dismantle the barriers often erected around the opera house. The Opera Locos features five eccentric singers—Alfredo, a worn-out tenor chasing past glories; Enrique, a swaggering baritone; Franelli, a pop-loving counter-tenor; Maria, a dreamy soprano; and Carmen, a wild mezzo.

To the uninitiated, these characters might seem like broad strokes, but O’Curneen reveals that this is a calculated invitation. “We want something recognisable so that when the curtain opens, and the characters come out, we’re already engaged with the audience,” he explains. “That sense of visual recognition is so important for the success of the show, just as the audio recognition.” By grounding the audience in familiar archetypes—the Diva, the Macho Man, the Fool—Yllana buys the freedom to take them somewhere unexpected.

However, the comedy cannot exist without the credibility. You cannot satirize virtuosity unless you possess it first.

“Definitely. The premise is you need high-standard singers—top-notch singers,” O’Curneen insists. “Obviously, you’re looking for singers who have a potential to come into our world of physical theatre and acting, but first they have to hit the notes with perfection. We had a pre-playlist of the best arias, amongst them Nessun dorma or O mio babbino caro. These have to be sung as everybody expects; you have to hit the note.”

This rigorous casting process highlights the unique challenge Yllana sets for its performers. The world of opera is often one of stillness, of “park and bark,” where the voice is everything, and the body is merely a vessel. Yllana demands that the vessel be as expressive as the voice.

“Once we selected the singers, we would ask them to do certain routines just to see how well they express themselves in body movement and physical gesture,” O’Curneen says. “Based on that potential, we would select the five voices of opera. Once we went into our rehearsal studio, we had to train them. They sang very well, but we had to train them to express themselves in movement without using words. That was an amazing experience because they were very enthusiastic. Sometimes they would say that from their experience in opera, the directive was ‘just stand there and sing.’ For us, it was completely contrary: get used to a lot of movement, but also sing.”

The Eloquence of Silence

While the singing is the headline act, the secret weapon of The Opera Locos is its manipulation of silence. O’Curneen speaks of the show’s rhythm not just as a musical conductor, but as a master of suspense.

“You’re dealing with silence as well as with the eloquence of silence,” he observes. “You can develop a moment of intrigue or suspense with silence. And then you can suddenly go to sing a high note and create a moment of awe and wonder. You use the whole spectrum of expression… calculating exactly how to use it.”

It is this dynamic—the tension of a silent gesture broken by the overwhelming power of the human voice—that elevates the production beyond simple parody. It requires a technical precision that rivals the musical score itself. “You can’t develop a very elaborate discourse without words,” O’Curneen admits. “So you have to keep it simple. It has to be sharp. It has to be concise.”

From La Movida to London

To understand the anarchic spirit that drives this precision, one must look back to the soil from which it sprang. The company was born in Madrid in the early 90s, but its roots are tangled in the cultural explosion of the 1980s—La Movida Madrileña. Emerging from the long shadow of the Franco dictatorship, Spain was in the throes of a counter-cultural awakening. It was a time of absolute, intoxicating freedom, a spirit that O’Curneen and his co-founders imbibed deeply.

**Yllana, The Opera Locos, Image Credit Março 2023**

“We grew up in the eighties back in Madrid, and there was this amazing movement called La Movida,” O’Curneen recalls, his voice warming at the memory. “Pedro Almodóvar was one of the highly recognized figures from that movement. Back in those days, there was a tremendous sense of freedom. You could say whatever you want, the way you want. That was freedom of expression. By having that freedom, new ideas spring up because you’re not so confined. There were no speech police or thought police.”

“Back in those days, everything could be said, especially when you’re on a stage,” he continues. “The stage was respected as a space of freedom to be able to say anything. It was very provocative, but in a constructive fashion. We felt that comedy was the genre that could express criticism freely through parody or satire. It is a very incisive way of seeing things, and we’ve always stayed loyal to that.”

If La Movida provided the spirit, the structure came from a more northern source. The absurdity, the willingness to poke fun at the establishment, the seamless blend of the high and the low—it all points to a certain group of British surrealists.

“For us, Monty Python was essential,” O’Curneen admits. “We loved Monty Python’s absurdity and its complexity. Back in the eighties and nineties, they were a source of inspiration. They had that combination of silliness and parody, parodying the serious institutions of society. They were able to flip it, and you could actually laugh at that.”

Restoring the “Greatest Show on Earth”

This irreverence is precisely what makes The Opera Locos so potent. It takes an institution that often takes itself entirely too seriously and reminds us that, at its heart, opera is about human frailty, passion, and melodrama—all things that are inherently funny. Yet, in a world where “purists” guard the gates of high culture with zeal, Yllana’s approach might seem risky. O’Curneen, however, views his work not as vandalism, but as restoration.

“It used to be probably one of the best shows in town,” he says of opera’s golden age. “It was one of the greatest shows on Earth back in those days. And I can imagine people were just awestruck to see operas back in those days. But nowadays there’s just so much on offer that it’s kind of pushed aside to sort of maybe be some sort of elite sort of understanding.”

By stripping away the elitism, Yllana returns opera to its populist roots. “We’re not too focused on that,” he says of the potential backlash from purists. “We know what we want to do and to say. It has as much to do with our brand of physical comedy as our perspective on what a show has to be like. We have no trouble if purists don’t like it. We know this is not a show for purists. And they might not even come to see it, and that’s okay.”

“The show has one clear objective, which is entertainment and amusement,” he adds firmly. “We have no problem with that word. I know some people are a bit snobby or feel that’s a dirty word, but we like to say this is opera without the boring bits. If it helps people who don’t usually go close to opera—if they come out and say, ‘Well, I’m going to listen to it more often’, or we’ve opened up that curiosity—wel,l that’s fine. That’s great.”

There is also a deeper layer to the clowning, a vulnerability that O’Curneen is keen to highlight. The characters on stage aren’t just performing for each other; they are engaged in a desperate, meta-theatrical bid for affection. “It’s like a parallel theme or narrative,” he explains. “Loving… trying to find the love amongst themselves, but also looking for the love of the audience.” It is this naked pursuit of connection that stops the show from becoming only a very polished cartoon.

A Universal Language

The company’s return to London is a significant marker in its 35-year history, but for Scottish audiences, Yllana holds a special, even older significance. Long before they were filling the Peacock to celebrate its 30th year, they were cutting their teeth at the Edinburgh Fringe. O’Curneen reveals a delightful nugget of history that ties the Madrid-based troupe to the very fabric of Scottish theatre history.

“I must say, our international dimension dates back to 1992,” he says. “Believe it or not, one of our historical highlights is being programmed at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh back in 1993. It was a parody of bullfighting. It was performed with no words, and they loved it because we were doing a parody of machismo and of the typical Spanish stereotypes. That was our first hit back then.”

It is fitting that a company which found early success mocking machismo in Edinburgh is now returning to the UK with a show that mocks the stuffiness of the opera house. The language of physical comedy, after all, knows no borders. Whether in Madrid, Edinburgh, or London, the human body failing to maintain its dignity is universally understood.

“We’re not too focused on that,” he says of the potential backlash from purists. “We know what we want to do and to say. It has as much to do with our brand of physical comedy as our perspective on what a show has to be like. We have no trouble if purists don’t like it.

“It is very universal,” O’Curneen reflects. “We’ve been dedicated for thirty years to creating shows with very little use of words. Physical theatre is about exploring ways of expressing ideas or feelings in a way that anybody can understand. It has the fundamental common denominators of humanity. We talk about human frailty. Everybody can connect to that. When I say frailty, I mean comedy—the sources of comedy are defects and malfunctions and errors, and that’s fantastic.”

As they look toward the London run, Yllana shows no signs of slowing down. They are already deep in production for their next “antagonistic” experiment—a comedy woven around Flamenco, co-produced with Sadler’s Wells, which is destined for Edinburgh next August. But for now, the focus is on The Opera Locos and the simple, radical act of making people laugh at the things they are told to revere.

It is a delicate balance, this mixing of the sublime and the ridiculous. But when it works, as O’Curneen notes, it achieves something that neither genre can manage alone. It is not just about the gag; it is about the sudden, shocking realization of beauty amidst the chaos.

“We’ve tried combining comedy with tragedy,” O’Curneen concludes. “You might have a whole show where you have moments of comedy where people are laughing, and then suddenly you have very heartfelt moments. They can coexist really well. We’ve done a couple of shows now where you can have people on the edge of their seats laughing and at the same time shedding a tear. And that,” he says, “is an extraordinary experience.”

What more can you ask of a night at the theatre?

Featured Image: Yllana, The Opera Locos, Image Credit Fernando Moreno