(sung in English)
Coliseum
Cio-Cio San – Mary Plazas
Suzuki – Pamela Helen Stephen
Pinkerton – Timothy Richards
Sharpless – George van Bergen
Goro – Alun Rhys-Jenkins
Prince Yamadori – Alexander Robin
Baker
The Bonze –Mark Richardson
Yakuside – Philip Daggett
Imperial Commissioner – Paul Napier-Burrows
Official Registrar – Roger Begley
Mother – Natalie Herman
Aunt –Judith Douglas
Cousin – Morag Boyle
Kate Pinkerton – Catherine Young
Anthony Minghella (director)
Sarah Tipple (revival
director)
Michael Levine (set designs)
Hang Feng (costumes)
Peter Mumford (lighting)
Blind Summit Theatre
(puppetry)
Chorus of the English
National Opera (chorus master: Martin Fitzpatrick)
Orchestra of the English
National Opera
Gianluca Marciano (conductor)
Many readers will doubtless already
have seen the late Anthony Minghella’s Madam
Butterfly, now revived by Sarah Tipple, whether at the Coliseum, at the
Met, or even in Vilnius. This, however,
was my first viewing, and I found it rather impressive. There is any number of
ways in which one might in performance respond to Puccini’s deeply
problematical orientalism, though simply failing to do so and reproducing or
rather vulgarising it is surely no longer an option, if ever it really were.
Minghella’s staging, aided immensely by the rest of his collaborative team,
offers a convincing blend of abstraction, stylisation, and moments through
which more conventional, if highly disturbing, emotion, may flow like blood –
or like the scarlet, silken banners unfurled by actors and dancers. The
relative abstraction of Michael Levine’s versatile set designs focuses our
attention upon the drama rather than irrelevant incidentals. In a relationship
that partakes in contrast and complementarity, the ‘beauty’ – I affix inverted
commas, since Western eyes will doubtless perceive such things rather differently
from Japanese eyes, and in any case, no group sees everything in the same
manner – of Hang Feng’s ‘Oriental’ costumes reminds us that there should be a
degree of alienation as well as seduction and sympathy to our response.
Whatever the sins in which this opera indulges – and in many respects, racist,
sexist, etc., it seems to tick almost every box – that is of nothing when
compared with a modern opera audience treating it in unquestioning fashion. Ultimately, that remains our responsibility,
but a production can help or hinder; this does the former. Even the fall of
darkness and emergence of the stars at the end of the first act, ‘beautifully’
accomplished according to any understanding, both draws one in and holds one
slightly distanced, in a sense thus making one all the more dangerously
susceptible both to Puccini’s brazenly manipulative genius and to knowledge of
that manipulation. If it would be exaggerated to compare him to Strauss in
terms of sophistication, the effect and to a certain extent the technique are
not entirely dissimilar either.
The lack of realism, or
perhaps the theatricality that goes beyond realism, of Japanese puppetry makes
a great impression in that sense too. On one level, it is a sensible theatrical
solution to the problem of what to do with a small child. Yet to have Sorrow as
a puppet, visibly manipulated by some of the mysterious, dark shrouded figures
who intermittently populate the stage also heightens our sense of the clash
between artificiality and a crude, manipulative, yet highly potent emotionalism
that would collapse into mere sentimentality if any of us were not careful. To
have those figures’ dance of death suggest during Cio-Cio San’s suicide an outpouring of daemons – perhaps both
hers and ours – furthers the ambiguity
we require as a defence to the undeniable, dangerous power of the score’s
close.
At that point, conductor,
Gianluca Marciano and the ENO Orchestra pull out all the stops – as of course
does Puccini himself. There were times earlier on when it was difficult not to
feel the lack of a more incisive musical mind at work in the pit; sometimes,
the music floated along a little too amiably. Yet even when the performance is
more that of a Kapellmeister than a
great conductor, the niggling difficulties of the score – modernist, Wagnerian,
orientalist – have a way of continuing to insinuate themselves.
The cast for the most part
made the best of an unenviable job of singing Puccini in English. Timothy
Richards’s Pinkerton was, alas, something of a blemish, though language was not
here the problem. Rather, he lacked vocal or stage allure; one can believe up
to an extent in an unprepossessing American officer relying upon the force of
an occupying power to have his way, but it cannot be entirely that. (His pantomime encouragement of the audience to boo him at the end was, moreover, quite out of keeping with the sensibility of work and production.) Mary
Plazas, despite a few shaky moments – perhaps most notably, her very first
line, and then the first line of ‘Un bel di, vedremo’ – offered a sympathetic,
highly involving performance in the title role. Pamela Helen Stephen’s Suzuki
was warmly sympathetic too; one felt her protectiveness, her love, and indeed
her intelligence. George van Bergen made for a tortured – in a good sense! –
Sharpless, his humanity contrastingly strongly with Pinkerton’s cowardice. And
though her role may be small, Catherine Young made as close to a
three-dimensional impression of Kate Pinkerton as one has any right to expect:
sensible, concerned, and in a sense as ‘other’ as the other wife she faced.
Various of the other smaller roles were well taken, in a performance that
benefited from a fine sense of ensemble.
