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Pub opera that raises the bar La Bohème OperaUpClose Belgrade Theatre, Coventry **** OPERAUPCLOSE is a youthful opera company
founded in 2009, which only two years later picked up a Laurence Olivier
award - confirming it as one of the most inventive forces in Touring
Opera circulating round England today. It is currently based
at the equally award-winning King's Head Pub in Islington, which has
pioneered its own enterprising programme of Theatre and stagings: art of
a high order in delightfully informal surroundings; and is now embarking
on opera, with Joanna Lumley, no less, as its patron. Their production of La Bohème, directed by
Robin Norton-Hale, one of OperaUpClose's founding triumvirate, and
capitalising on a vital new libretto by him (Paris entertainingly
transported to the environs of Soho, with a nod to Maida Vale and
allusions – but surprisingly, not cheap ones - to Jamie Oliver,
Strictly Come Dancing and the inevitable Primark), spearheaded the
company's first forays onto the London stage scene, and is as fresh as
daisy today. This is partly because changing casts inevitably give it a new verve, and a slightly different slant. So electrified were the performances, this could easily have been a First Night. Maybe surprisingly, Bohème (first staged
1896) is, to my mind, - a ‘problem' opera to stage. In one sense, like
Carmen, it is a sure-fire hit with audiences: essential box
office, as here, where the Against that is the fact that it's tricky to do
something new with it, and the best advice is usually to let it
speak for itself. OperaUpClose's most glaring departure – albeit one
tried by other ensembles too: most recently in the Midlands by The Belgrade's unsuspecting audience was hoicked
out of the auditorium into the foyer and there, glass in hand, witnessed
one of the funniest fallouts I can recall between Musetta - the
brilliant, feisty Prudence Sanders, a genius at quarrelling, for future
casting directors - and her ghastly sugardaddy (the hilarious Martin
Nelson, a veteran of UK opera companies including Covent Garden, with
Mozart's Don Alfonso and Doctor Bartolo in his repertoire, and a good
deal of contemporary opera too). This was quick-fire interchange – stichomythia,
as the ancient Greeks called it – at its best. The pompous fuming and
seething, cat-like spitting were, to risk a weak rhyme, side-splitting. Musetta's on/off boyfriend, the aspiring painter
Marcello (sung here by Tom Stoddart), is of course the beneficiary. It's
in the later scenes, following or as part of his and Musetta's own spat
(contrived to offset the tentative reconciliation of Rodolfo and Mini),
that this Marcello gets his lease of life – and blossoms. His was a
voice with potential: maybe on the way to something good. Stoddart's
English enunciation, for instance, like the rest of this cast's, was
exemplary. With his moody student slouch and swagger (somehow the tight
jeans don't help), he moves quasi-naturally but somehow not yet well.
Real stage-savvy and imagination was lacking. Dickon Gough's stork-like basso Colline,
pointlessly (as it turns out) pawning for Mimi not a coat but – here - a
cigarette box, with his famously sad set-piece aria, did catch the
audience's ear, even if some lowest notes need further honing. Alistair
Sutherland as fellow-student Schaunard, sometimes a tricky role to get
right, was pretty successful too – not just bouncy (which he has to be)
but engaged, serious and empathetic. The boyish games he coordinates in
Act IV just before Mimi returns to die were merrily executed by all
four: Norton-Hale's direction did its stuff; all was well coordinated.
The smaller parts counted for something. I liked
the barmaid (Rebecca Shanks) and barfly (Claire Daly), trysting with a
rather good male chorus (a quartet, achieving much). Barnaby Rea's
intoxicated, economically doomed Benoît (the Landlord) was rather fun,
too: Puccini's Act I vignette is usually a winner, and so it was here. Everything hinges on Rodolfo and Mimi: if they
can deliver, this opera soars (literally) to the heights. And my
goodness, they could. OperaUpClose's tour sports a triple cast for the
two leads. Here were enchanted by a Celtic duo: Welshman Gareth Dafydd
Morris and the delightful Royal Scottish Academy and Guildhall product
Rhona McKail. Some wise teachers have worked magic on these two
voices. Morris, from the land that produced not just world-beating
baritone Bryn Terfel but the superb tenor Dennis O'Neill, sounded as if
he was in hot pursuit of the latter. His breathing is simply
first-class. Hence his wonderful sustaining, and ability to encompass
high notes (if just once overstrained) with not just ease, but beauty.
He was a joy to listen to. He could manage the subtly phased changes of
mood, visual as well as musical; there is recitative in Puccini, and he
executed it the best of this cast; indeed, he charmed with almost every
note. So crucial are the duets – often enough in unison or direct
imitation - it's as if Puccini's Mimi and Rodolfo fall in love with each
other's voices, as well the hearts and souls they sing of. And here, who
wouldn't? If poet Rodolfo was on the hefty side (and after
Pavarotti, who cares?), McKail was a beautiful, sightly Mimi, even if
she looks a mite more like a Musetta. Act II, despite the cocktail
shenanigans does little to build her character; thus by Act III, where
they have already split up, we yearn for a bit more of the history and
build-up than Puccini's librettists, Illica and Giacosa, allow us;
conceivably in Scènes de la vie de bohème, the spirited, garish
novel/play by Henri Murger on which it's based, more is spelt out. Yet this Angst-ridden Third Act
rencontre has a different function: it shows us patently shy
youngsters, trying to reconcile but not knowing how to. It's just as
pathetic (in the real sense) as the original Rodolfo-Mimi meeting and
the inevitable garret death scene.
McKail carried off all three beautifully, her top
notes (one exit sequence above all), absolutely soul-searing; middle
notes just a fraction tending to flatten. At Mimi's (here) bloodless
expiry from advanced tuberculosis, Norton-Hale's moves and blocking, for
once, seemed less than ideal: the moment of terrible dramatic irony
where the others realise Morris's Rodolfo is the only one unaware of her
death was sensitively done, but not surely as persuasively as it might
have been. So perhaps a mixed bag, but much of this La
Bohème bordered on excellence. As for Puccini, his style is so
gloriously unplaceable. The legacy of Massenet, doubtless; a whiff of
Tristan; short passages of pure Debussy – more a coincidence than a
borrowing; funeral music like Mussorgsky or updated Chopin; and not so
much Verdi as Fauré too. Yet a concoction that is so individually
Puccini emerges, and had already done so by his preceding masterpiece,
Manon Lescaut (1893).
Why was all this so evident? Because the true
hero of the evening was the accompanist, Elspeth Wilkes. To have a
repetiteur of such quality accounts substantially for the musical
excellence of this show (a chance to mention OperaUpClose's other
ventures in English, including Tosca, The Barber of Seville,
Don Giovanni, The Turn of the Screw and – incredibly – the
doyen of them all, Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea, which
even in opera's teething days sported one of the most brilliant libretti
ever written. But Wilkes is no backroom girl. Well placed front
sidestage right – the Belgrade's acoustic somehow loved this, for it
worked wonders, adding rich colours and resonance to the keyboard sound;
the piano itself, presumably in-house, was almost a very good one
– Wilkes delivered a performance that revealed all the subtleties,
mood-shifts, interleaving and understatement of Puccini's often
overhammed score. (Her attentive accompaniment of Colline's aria showed
her beautiful restraint. Elsewhere, she positively scampered.) What about piano accompaniments in principle?
Clonter Opera, in It is in fact the way singers hear throughout the
rehearsal process. What's more, it was from piano (or two-piano) scores
that, before the 78, LP and CD age, one composer learned from another:
like Debussy from Wagner, Schoenberg from Brahms. They really are
revealing. Maybe a little too bald for some, though no one in this
audience seemed other than transported. Colourless? Not at all. La Bohème is a seasonal progression that
even Ibsen or Strindberg would have been proud of:
Spring-Summer-Autumn-Winter. First love-burgeoning-disillusion-death. A
triumph of this fine, well thought-through staging, abetted by an apt
'60s-'70s (or maybe current) student garret from designer Lucy Read
(especially associated with the daring, innovative Oval House Theatre in
Kennington), and expressive, well-aimed lighting (never easy with a
single-night performance at any venue) by Richard Williamson (after
Chris Nairne's original scheme) alternating whites and amber-golds with
not just taste and sensitivity, but relevance, was that it caught this
progressional, evolutionary, joy-into-desolation feel so well. The tiny hand may not have been frozen (‘Your
fingers are half-frozen', in this version); but with Mimi's demise, a
light went out on the student world anywhere. Roderic Dunnett OperaUpClose's new opera is Donizetti's L'elisir D'amore, set in 1950's Hollywood, conceived and directed by Valentina Ceschi and written by Verity Bargate award winner Thomas Eccleshare. To book - www.kingsheadtheatre.com - 0207 478 0160
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