| Press Comments |
The Tablet - Robert Thicknesse, Cannizaro Park, 28 July 2007 **** |
| Perfectly to scale Most summer opera, with its frocks, picnics and fizzy wine, is founded on the notion that it is all frightfully quaint and rather a marvellous jape – it takes place pretty much inside inverted commas. That’s generally why lighter rep works best: the incongruity of a boozy shindig in the middle of a tragedy or contemplative oratorio (Glyndebourne’s St Matthew Passion being the most recent and glaring example) ends to ruin both show and, importantly, supper. But it’s not all like that. Opera Holland Park, which I reviewed a month ago and continues until late August, puts on its shows in a matter-of-fact, unpretentious way, at democratic prices, while remaining more actually convivial than many places that frantically promote jollity as part of the deal. Another contender – the cheapest and cheerfullest of the lot – is Garden Opera (www.gardenopera.co.uk), a touring company that for 13 years has been doing a fairly immense number of performances (50 this year) of its chosen work each summer in all manner of venues from Cornwall to Cawdor. It’s usually light-hearted enough – I laughed to the point of incapacity at its production of The Barber of Seville a few years ago – but this is an outfit with a serious social conscience, too: director Peter Bridges models his methods on those of Federico García Lorca and his company La Barraca, which took theatre to the most deprived bits of peasant Spain. OK, rural England isn’t quite the same thing, and opera isn’t radical theatre, but you take the world as you find it. It’s a surprise to find the company doing Puccini – not least because of the demands of rescoring the magician’s work for the company’s regular ensemble of piano, violins, cello, clarinet and trumpet. It’s an absurd undertaking: Puccini paints so much in sound of every hue and texture … and yet Bernie Lafontaine’s reduction captures to a truly amazing degree the timbres of each scene of this pretty various score, and under Bridges’ direction the tempos sway and jig along with all the fanatically detailed attention to the ebb and flow of real life and situations that Puccini intended. It’s fashionable to be sniffy about Bohème, though I’ve no idea why – it seems to me that if you like opera at all you have at least to fall on your knees in admiration of its extraordinary craft. Sure, its ambitions are not huge – to wring a sentimental tear and an indulgent smile; but even these little emotions are blood brothers to the forging of imaginative sympathy and the increase of humanity. And this works so much better on the small scale than lost in the spaces of a grand opera house. Bohème is all intimacy, from its deft sketching of the relationships of the four impecunious flatmates to Mimì’s sotto-voce death. Stage director Martin Lloyd-Evans has the deftest touch in all this. The action is updated to occupied Paris – worth it for the guying of Musetta’s beau alone, here portrayed as a hapless, ageing ’Allo ’Allo German general – which emphasises the boys’ generally escapist lifestyle: they are middle-class lads playing at slumming it, and around them real life is happening in a way that only really comes home when Mimì – the true face of poverty and oppression – dies in their midst: getting real and growing up arrive rather suddenly. It accentuates the nature of Bohème – which tours until September – as a romantic comedy that goes wrong. And it is played by its triple-cast singers with terrific assurance and a million nice little touches: the way Rodolfo’s (Chris Steele) face cheekily lights up when Mimì knocks on his door – “A woman!” – is priceless, as are Mimì’s knowingly shy little glances conveyed by Claire Surman. The flatmates’ joshing is likeable and touching, not the slightly embarrassing galumph you get with more mature singers – and they can all sing too. I’ve said it before, and will again: this company reminds you why you like opera. Robert Thicknesse |