Director Clemence Williams talks stories for women, how opera can flourish, and the challenges of the QVB’s Ladies’ Room.

Women have it tough in opera. Very few make it out alive, others are driven mad, and some just have to make peace with the cards they’ve been dealt. Composers like Puccini delighted in torturing his heroines, and audiences can easily gesture to a catalogue of operas where the leading lady expires over several acts.

Clemence Williams, director of the pasticcio Chamber Pot Opera, is fed up with these storylines, calling them “simplistic and under-developed”. Wanting to “see the women I see every day on the street onstage”, she took up the famous description of mezzo roles as limited to “witches, bitches, or breeches”, and fashioned a new story that interrogates these tropes in a thoroughly modern way.

Chamber Pot tells the story of three young women who meet for the first time in a public bathroom. Each faces a predicament of her own – one is in an abusive relationship, another fearful she has come on too strong on a first date, and the third has been promoted to her dream job. Originally produced for...