Conor Mitchell: ‘I tried to assimilate for years, but sex is a big part of life’
The composer and theatre-maker talks to Freya Parr about agitprop, injustices and the inherent campness of the Catholic Church
One of six current Southbank Centre Associate Artists, the ever-engaging Conor Mitchell discusses the mechanics of power, how knowledge changes our perception of art and why he considers himself an actor more than a composer, with Freya Parr.
‘Always a pleasure to get taken up through the back door, isn’t it?’ Conor Mitchell says, winking. We’ve arrived via the artist’s entrance, heading to a room at the top of the Southbank Centre. While many top-tier artists navigate interviews with wariness and restraint, it quickly becomes clear that Mitchell – one of the Southbank Centre’s current cohort of Associate Artists – is not going to approach with such caution.
Over the next hour, nothing is off-limits as we discuss the wide-ranging themes that charge his work: sex, politics, religion, and the mechanics of power. All are with the same razor-sharp candour and mischievous humour that have made his operas and music theatre so distinctive.
Mitchell works across multiple disciplines, from opera and music theatre to large-scale audiovisual projects. ‘My primary art form is music, but I’m as much a playwright, theatre designer and theatre director as I am an orchestral musician.’ Blending stage design with contemporary visual arts, Mitchell calls his work ‘agitprop’ (political propaganda). He takes socially relevant, politically charged subjects, and reframes them in playful, often seductive forms. ‘I find injustice interesting, but I try to present it in a different way. I’d like audiences to see moral high grounds from a different stance.’ Much of this work is created with the Belfast Ensemble, the company he founded in 2017 to give Northern Ireland a home for ambitious cross-disciplinary projects.
Mitchell’s tenure as one of the current cohort of Associate Artists is not the start of his relationship with the Southbank Centre. In 2023, the Queen Elizabeth Hall staged the English premiere of Abomination – Mitchell’s opera that took its name from the notorious 2008 radio interview with DUP MP Iris Robinson, in which she referred to homosexuality as an abomination, shortly after a gay man was violently attacked in Belfast. The work thrives on sharp contradictions: hateful soundbites are wrapped in playful, seductive music. ‘It would have been easy to just bash the DUP,’ Mitchell explains, ‘but there’s no nuance in that. I wanted the audience to see that she was dealing with a spiritual crisis, and frame her within the playground bullying tactics of the men around her.’ Was it about creating sympathies? ‘It was about using her story to say to the audience that things aren’t always what they seem.’
Religion, politics and conflict are themes at the heart of much of Mitchell’s work – unsurprising, perhaps, considering his upbringing in 1980s Northern Ireland at the height of The Troubles. At 11, he discovered music through his brother, who played the saxophone, but it was the stage that always called him. ‘I have always thought of myself as an actor,’ he says. ‘Even now, I don’t really consider myself a composer. I work in the theatre business, and music is the language I tell my stories through.’
‘I have always thought of myself as an actor. Even now, I don’t really consider myself a composer. I work in the theatre business, and music is the language I tell my stories through.’
England became his home at 18, before he returned to Northern Ireland in his 30s. ‘The Belfast I went back to was very different.’ His experience as an Irish émigré in London partly inspired his latest opera, Dublin Jack, which recently had a workshop performance at the Southbank Centre.
Inspired by Jack Saul – a 19th-century Irish sex worker who cashed in on Victorian London’s aristocratic homosexual desire, until the Cleveland Street Scandal landed him in prison – the opera explores the dark irony in the timing of these events. ‘Just across town, Jack the Ripper was murdering women. It was the same chief inspector who investigated both cases. Many have suggested that his failure to catch Jack the Ripper fuelled his zeal with which he prosecuted the men in the Cleveland Street Scandal.’ The subsequent moral panic that seized the nation resulted in the introduction of the gross indecency laws in Britain which, in Northern Ireland, stood until 1981.
What Mitchell is interested in here is the preconceived notions or expectations an audience will bring with them to a performance. ‘When you hear that it’s about a Victorian rent boy with a 10-inch cock who took on the British establishment, you expect a laugh. I think audiences probably expect Oliver! with dildos.’ So, are they going to be disappointed? ‘Well, not entirely. There are quite a few dildos in it. But what I want to do is deliver a little bit of that at the start and then turn the entire thing into an examination of sexual violence between the classes.’
Mitchell has always taken a brazen approach to storytelling on stage, but has his method evolved over his career? ‘Increasingly, I’ve become more graphic in my language, which is something I was always very reticent to do. I tried to assimilate for years, but sex is a big part of life,’ he says. ‘You have to understand the human body if you want to understand people.’
‘The Vatican is what happens if you let gay men loose on interior design for 2000 years’
He attributes his turn towards using visceral imagery partly to the ‘abject sexualisation’ he sees within the Catholic Church – an institution that seems to fascinate and appal him in equal measures, and one he plans to explore further in his forthcoming Southbank Centre project. ‘I grew up with that graphic religious imagery around me,’ he explains. ‘You’re taught about virginity and bodily fluids before you even know what sex is. There are lots of good people in the Catholic Church, but when it comes to a theocratic organisation telling a few billion others what to do sexually and morally – and condemning them to an afterlife? I think that’s dangerous.’
For Mitchell, the Church’s relationship to the body is both fetishised and flamboyant – a tension he finds artistically provocative. ‘The Vatican is what happens if you let gay men loose on interior design for 2000 years,’ he laughs. ‘Artistically, the Catholic Church is the campest organisation in the world. They love scented candles, they worship a half-naked man on a cross – like, am I the only one that noticed Jesus had a six-pack?’
He hopes to bring together these concepts for a project with the figure of Pope Joan – a woman believed to have reigned as pope during the Middle Ages – at the heart of the story, exploring what the feminine represents within an entirely male environment. As is common in Mitchell’s works, the story will expand far beyond this central premise. ‘I want to draw a parallel between the Catholic Church and the tech oligarchs of America,’ he says. ‘In medieval times, people didn’t read or write, so they believed what they were told. Very powerful people in the pulpit told you what to think, and you did it. I see a similarity in Big Tech today, with powerful people calling the shots and developing an uber class.’
Subverting expectations and provoking questions seems to be Mitchell’s modus operandi. He tells me about a new project the Belfast Ensemble are currently working on called Good Shit, Bad People, with nine pieces commissioned by nine separate composing teams, designed to interrogate the age-old ‘can we separate the art from the artist?’ conundrum. The idea came to him when he was captivated by a charming country song coming from the TV, which turned out to be by Myra Hindley. ‘When I found out who it was, my brain suddenly went, oh, that’s an awful song,’ he says. ‘I thought that reaction was interesting, so I wondered what would happen if I wrote a string quartet that incorporated that audio and performed it at a children’s festival. There would be moral outrage.’
‘If you dismissed everything because someone had a questionable life, there’d be nothing left’
That unsettling shift in perception sits at the heart of Mitchell’s artistic mission. So what should we do with good works by bad people then? ‘There’s no solution, because if you dismissed everything because someone had a questionable life, there’d be nothing left. I personally can’t watch Wagner because his antisemitic pamphlets are aggressive and sinister to me, and I can’t understand why students still have posters of Harvey Weinstein’s films on their wall. So there is a rub there, and I don’t know what the answer is, but I’m interested in how knowledge changes the way you look at art.’
Mitchell believes music is the best way of interrogating these conundrums, and so many others. ‘Music is, I suppose, what you do when words fail,’ he says. For Mitchell, it’s a language that can make the world both more vivid and more unsettling – a prism through which we see our own contradictions.
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