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| Images: ROH/Bill Cooper |
Dupont – Jean-Luc Vincent
Smith – Chris AddisonPatacha – Samuel Sakker
Zalzal – Samuel Dale Johnson
King Ouf I – Christophe Mortagne
Siroco – Simon Bailey
Laoula – Hélène Guilmette
Hérisson de Porc-Epic – François Piolino
Aloès – Julie Boulianne
Tapioca – Aimery Lefèvre
Lazuli – Kate Lindsey
Maids of Honour – Lauren Fagen, Katy Batho, Kiera Lyness, Emily Edmonds, Louise Armit, Bernadette Lord
Mariame Clément (director)
Julia Hansen (designs)Jon Clark (lighting)
Mathieu Guilhamon (choreography)
Mariame Clément, Jean-Luc Vincent, Chris Addison (new dialogue)
Before saying anything else, I
must commend the Royal Opera on broadening its repertoire. Anything that
leavens a diets of endless Traviatas
can only be a good, or at least a better, thing. Moreover, to perform a work
that had not previously been given at Covent Garden is a better thing still.
Alas, Chabrier’s opéra bouffe did not,
on the whole, have a good night, and, although I know it has its admirers – the
‘lighter’ the music, the more militant the admiration tends to be – I really
cannot claim to have been won over, at least insofar as I could tell from
Mariame Clément’s confused production.
Clément never seems to be clear
– or at least I was not – whether what we see might be intended ironically or
not. Is the cod-mediævalism of the set designs intended to be amusing? I really
have not the faintest idea, likewise with respect, more disturbingly, to its
orientalism. A post-modern hotchpotch, is, as usual with such presentations,
very much the thing, almost daring one to seem too serious, too intellectual,
by requesting some degree of coherence. Ambiguity is not necessarily a bad
thing, yet few of the metatheatrical possibilities go for anything very much;
the creation of new characters and dialogue might be said to be frame the work,
but ultimately to little purpose. (I was left with the impression that the
purpose was really to create a role, in English, for Chris Addison.) Clément
tries too hard, perhaps: there are too many silly things at which to gawp, and
which do not cohere. (One might say that of the opera itself, I suppose, but
let us at least try to give it the benefit of the doubt, without initially
resorting to the disingenuous, ‘well, it’s supposed to be incoherent’.)
Spectacle, especially in the French tradition, can be an important tool of
drama, but here Wagner’s accusation – yes, I am doubtless too Teutonic by half –
of ‘effect without cause’ seems far more just here than it was for Meyerbeer.
Only people who think the appearance of a hot air balloon or a large elephant
is intrinsically amusing – and there seem to have been many such people, I
grant you – will have escaped the feeling of tedium during the lengthy progress
of the evening.
For the real problem is, of
course, that Meyerbeer could – and should – work very well at the Royal Opera
House; the great pity of the Royal
Opera’s Robert le diable was the
director, Laurent Pelly’s inability to take it seriously. (That and, of course,
the deadly conducting of the dread Daniel Oren.) A work such as L’Etoile would surely be far better off
in a smaller, indeed a much smaller, theatre. Not only would one see the
artists on stage, better to respond to their facial expressions, their shrugs,
their other gestures; there would be no need to inflate the scenic
representation beyond something this slight work can bear. As I said, there is
nothing to bring out the protective impulse in certain music-lovers than to
dare to express scepticism concerning something that is ‘light’. One
immediately becomes humourless, joyless, all the rest of it. It certainly would
not help one’s cause with them to point to the Leipzig Gewandhaus and its
motto, ‘Res severa est verum gaudium’. But surely it is as ridiculous to claim
that all ‘light music’ is good as to claim that all ‘serious music’ is. Palestrina is not Parsifal; I am not sure that L’Etoile
deserves to be cherished as, say, the best of Offenbach, or even middling
Offenbach. Silliness becomes wearing rather quickly; excellent satire does not.
Matters might have been helped,
had Mark Elder, however, been a little less ‘serious’. The evening’s progress
was fitful, one first-act duet in particular plodding rather than sparkling. Taken
on its own terms, the playing of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House was
impressive, yet I could not help but think that zippier direction would have
helped it along. It was not actually an especially long evening, but it felt
like it, the first act less than an hour felt to me considerably longer than
its equivalent in Parsifal. And it
was difficult, to put it mildly, to feel that as much was at stake.
The singing was generally good,
though, as indeed was the acting. Christophe Mortagne’s King Ouf tilted more
towards the latter, but perhaps that is as it should be. Kate Lindsey offered a
spirit and, at times, almost touching performance in the role of the pedlar,
Lazuli, however tiresome the antics surrounding him/her. Addison and his
companion, Jean-Luc Vincent proved good company members, in no sense jealous of
the limelight, although I could certainly have done without the former's Sherlock Holmes set-piece. If Simon Bailey’s astrologist Siroco veered somewhat uneasily
between French and English, that was really the director’s responsibility. The
four visitors, Julie Boulianne, François
Piolino, Hélène Guilmette, and Aimery Lefèvre performed well throughout. Alas,
neither work nor performance approached the sum of its parts. One may or may
not have been supposed to care about the characters, but should one have felt
such utter indifference to the action, such as it was?
