Cape Town Opera presents Charles Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette. (Images by Nicholai Thomas)
It’s an unexpected setting for one of opera’s most celebrated love stories, running at Artscape Theatre from 18 to 29 November 2026.
Directed by Marcus Desando, with Kamal Khan conducting the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra, the production transports Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers from Renaissance Verona to a contemporary urban environment, where family rivalries, social divisions and inherited violence are immediately recognisable.
The Alley Fight Scene. (Images by Nicholai Thomas)
Premiered in Paris in 1867, Gounod’s opera is celebrated for its lyrical beauty, passionate duets and dramatic orchestral writing. Cape Town Opera’s production features House Soloists Brittany Smith as Juliette and Lukhanyo Moyake as Roméo, supported by an ensemble of established and emerging South African singers.
Brittany Smith as Juliette (Images by Nicholai Thomas)
South African scenographer, production designer, art director, and educator Leopold Senekal designed both the set and costumes. His work spans theatre, opera, film, and performance.
Recent credits include Zakes Mda’s And the Girls in Their Sunday Dresses at the Baxter Theatre Centre and Rise ’76: The Story of June 16th, which transferred from the Baxter to Johannesburg’s Market Theatre.
In 2023, he co-designed the sets and costumes for Cape Town Opera’s Tosca with Maritha Visagie.
Senekal approaches design as an integral part of storytelling, using architecture, costume, material and texture to express the emotional and psychological forces shaping a character’s world. His work often explores the tensions between beauty and brutality, history and contemporary culture.
For Roméo et Juliette, he draws on Cape Town’s contrasting urban environments to create a world in which tenderness and violence coexist.
Reimagining Verona through Cape Town
I spoke to Senekal about reimagining two operatic tragedies, the significance of authenticity in theatrical design and the challenge of creating
spectacle without sacrificing emotional intimacy.
You designed sets and costumes for Cape Town Opera’s Tosca in 2023 and now Roméo et Juliette. How did your approach differ, and what can audiences expect from your interpretation of Gounod’s opera?
I begin with the forces acting upon the characters. Who controls their world? What do they believe in? What are they prepared to risk for love? Those questions begin to suggest an architecture and the relationship between character and space.
From there, I develop the visual language, silhouettes and textures, incorporating and supporting the narrative and musical rhythms of the production.
With Tosca, the historical and visual research was intensive. I needed to understand the authority embedded in its world – the relationship between religious devotion, political power and the monumental presence of Rome. Grandeur needed to carry the possibility of intimidation. Beauty and brutality had to inhabit the same space.
A central organising principle was the divine number three: three acts, three principal characters and three main musical themes. The resonance with the Holy Trinity felt particularly charged within an opera where faith, desire and violence are so closely entangled.
The Secret Marriage. (Images by Nicholai Thomas)
That principle informed the design of a single set that transformed into three imposing settings – a sacred space, a seat of political power and, finally, a place of imprisonment and death. Although the settings changed, the underlying architecture remained, reinforcing the authority from which the characters could never quite escape.
Working with Maritha Visagie as co-designer, I made costume part of that structure, locating each person within its hierarchies while keeping their vulnerability visible.
With Roméo et Juliette, the design takes inherited violence into a contemporary urban world set in the vibrant streets of Cape Town.
Working with Marcus Desando, I have reimagined Verona through Cape Town’s urban alleys and recognisable landmarks, drawing on the contrasts that define the city – privilege and poverty, street violence and the tenderness that survives amid it.
Monumental panels continually reconfigure, changing the performers’ relationships to one another and to the space. They frame celebration, conceal intimacy and establish divisions. Graffiti assumes the territorial role of heraldry, while religious imagery suggests sanctuary and judgement.
Audiences can expect a collision of sculptural scale, urban street-style silhouettes, grungy textures and moments of unexpected softness.
Beneath that visual intensity, I want them to recognise two young people attempting to live differently from the world that raised them. We know how their story ends. The design must still allow us to hope.
Authenticity, spectacle and emotional intimacy
You’ve said that authenticity is central to your work and that design should reveal what a script leaves unspoken. How do you achieve this through sets, costumes and materials, particularly when balancing the spectacle of grand opera with the emotional vulnerability of its characters?
Authenticity is a responsibility I feel towards the entire production. My choices need to fit the same understanding of the work as the direction, music, and performances.
I can become very attached to an image, but if it distorts that understanding, I have to let it go.
I read for the emotional pressures beneath the dialogue. Love, fear, resentment, hate and compassion can all be expressed through spatial compression and composition. Status can be established through elevation, proportion or the cut of a garment. A threshold can suggest exclusion, while the distance between two characters can reveal what neither is prepared to say. These details help shape my visual interpretation of the story.
The weight, texture and transparency of materials, and how they respond to light, also influence a scene. Stiff fabrics restrict movement differently from softer ones, while worn surfaces suggest years of use and exposure.
In Roméo et Juliette, the recurring panels, with their battered surfaces, make the longstanding feud between the families visible. Generations of conflict and entrenched divisions are reflected in aspects of Cape Town’s urban landscape.
The Ballroom (Images by Nicholai Thomas)
That makes their absence in Juliette’s bedroom especially significant. The architecture gives way to drapery, filtered morning light and the intimacy of the bed. For a brief moment, the lovers have a space that feels their own. Its softness carries dramatic weight because we have experienced the world outside it.
Opera allows enormous visual ambition, but it also demands restraint. I pay attention to sightlines, negative space, the legibility of a gesture and how a costume moves with the singer.
An imposing composition can focus our attention on a single exposed figure. An uncluttered space can make an embrace feel almost unbearably intimate.
Ultimately, I want every design decision to serve the production’s emotional truth. In Roméo et Juliette, that means giving love enough presence that we feel what survives the destruction.
There is a line in the opera that expresses the conviction I want the whole design to honour: “La haine est le berceau de cet amour fatal!” (Hatred is the cradle of this ill-fated love...) (Juliette: Act I)
Cape Town Opera’s Roméo et Juliette runs at Artscape Theatre from 18 to 29 November 2026. Sung in French with English and isiXhosa subtitles. Tickets start at R180 through Webtickets or on 021 421 7695.
