Madama Butterfly, English National Opera, 16 May 2016

Coliseum

(sung in English, as Madam Butterfly)

Cio-Cio San – Rena Harms

Suzuki – Stephanie Windsor-Lewis
Kate Pinkerton – Samantha Price
Pinkerton – David Butt Philip
Sharpless – George van Bergen
Goro – Alun Rhys-Jenkins
Prince Yamadori – Matthew Durkan
The Bonze – Mark Richardson
Yakuside – Philip Daggett
Imperial Commissioner – Paul Napier-Burrows
Official Registrar – Roger Begley
Mother –Natalie Herman
Cousin – Morag Boyle
Aunt – Judith Douglas
Sorrow – Laura Caldow, Tom Espiner, Irena Stratieva

Anthony Minghella (director)

Carolyn Choa (associate director, choreography, revived by Anita Griffin)
Sarah Tipple (revival director)
Michael Levine (set designs)
Han Feng (costumes)
Peter Mumford (lighting, revived by Ian Jackson-French)
Blind Summit Theatre: Mark Down, Nick Barnes (puppetry)

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: James Henshaw)

Orchestra of the English National Opera

Richard Armstrong (conductor)

 

This was my second viewing of the late Anthony Minghella’s much-revived production of Madam Butterfly. As on the first occasion, Sarah Tipple was the excellent (insofar as I could tell) revival director. I cannot claim knowledge of bunraku (Japanese puppet-theatre) beyond the little I have read, but the contribution of Blind Summit Theatre seemed to me as impressive as before, both in itself and with respect to the intriguing interaction between the realism of the work and the æsthetic artificiality of the puppetry. Arnold Toynbee, quoted in the programme, wrote of an Osaka puppet show in 1929: ‘I duly found, as I had been assured beforehand I should find, it possible to entertain the illusion that the puppets were animated by an autonomous life of their own, although the human artists manipulating them were in full view of the spectators.’ So did I, on this occasion. ‘An artistic effect which, in the West,’ Toynbee went on, ‘would have been produced by the artifice of keeping the manipulators out of sight, was produced in Japan by their artistry in keeping themselves out of mind notwithstanding their visibility.’ Again, such was my experience, likewise with Toynbee’s claim that the puppeteers succeeded ‘in subjectively effacing their objectively visible living human forms’.

 

The greatest problem of all with the work remains, though. Is its Orientalism more or less offensive than that of Turandot? Probably less, but more to the point, it is different.  Minghella’s production – and here, that is even more than usual, a shorthand, for the designs and choreography, as well as the puppetry, are surely just as important – offers, as I wrote last time, ‘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 brazen, colourful Orientalism of Hang Feng’s costumes might fool some, but surely not many; it accuses us, ensures that we acknowledge our complicity. Its relationship toward the relative abstraction of Michael Levine’s set designs is interesting; both aspects interrogate the other in a far more dialectical production than lazy glancing at production stills – or lazy slouching in the comfort of one’s seat – might suggest.

 

More problematical, I think, is the work’s objectification of its heroine. Clearly we are not supposed to sympathise with Turandot, or Turandot (even if we are cynically manipulated to sympathise with Liù, and then revolted by her treatment – both onstage and by Puccini). Equally clearly, we are supposed to sympathise with Cio-Cio San. Yet her objectification as a young, a very young, Japanese woman (or should we say girl?) is at best problematical. My inclination would be to bring the element of imperialistic sex tourism to the fore, but there are other routes, and that taken by Minghella is fruitful, not least in its apparent disinclination to take sides. Indeed, in that respect one might say he is acting more strongly against Puccini than a simple indictment would. Similarly, nightfall and moonlight – or rather, star light – at the end of the first act perform, or at least may be understood to perform, a similar role: drawing us in to Puccini’s manipulations but, at the same time, so clearly a construction of beauty – puppets an element, but only one such element, of that – that we are enabled, I should say encouraged, to interrogate those manipulations. More Straussian than Strauss? Perhaps; at any rate, the effect was not entirely dissimilar.

 

If one can progress beyond those problems, or at least prevent them from overwhelming everything else, the composer’s magic might work all too well. Here, it did not, but for rather the wrong reason. Rena Harms’s anonymous, small-voiced Cio-Cio San rarely convinced. Diction was a problem – so, of course, was the use of English in the first place, but let us leave that on one side – but there were difficulties too with stage presence and indeed with a convincing assumption on the terms of this particular staging. Too often, the voice sounded stretched, or worse. The orchestra and indeed other characters can supply some of what is missing, but they cannot – and could not – supply it all. Richard Armstrong’s conducting, moreover, whilst admirable in its lack of sentimentality, arguably went too far in the opposite direction. Too often, the orchestra sounded merely cold and brash; what we heard was neither ‘Romantic’ nor modernistic. That said, kinship with Götterdämmerung at the beginning of the third act registered more strongly than I recall. Orchestrally, this was a performance that improved significantly over the evening; maybe it will over the (lengthy) run too.

 

Elsewhere on stage there was much to enjoy. David Butt Philip’s Pinkerton was ambiguous. He seemed trapped by circumstance, by a degree of genuine enthusiasm for his tragic ‘project’. This was a rabbit trapped in the headlights, even if the headlights were of his own – as well as imperialism’s – making. Words and vocal line, moreover, were so clear that one could have taken dictation. George van Bergen’s Sharpless was also a fine musico-dramatic portrayal; again, the conflicts within the character were intelligently, even movingly, represented to us. Stephanie Windsor Lewis’s Suzuki was sympathetic throughout, especially during the third act. Most of the ‘smaller’ roles, not least the wheedling Goro of Alun Rhys-Jenkins, were cast from strength too, which makes it all the more surprising that such an error was made in the casting of so thin-voiced a Butterfly. Not for the first time – and I do not mean this in a nationalistic sense – one was left wondering why an American singer had been miscast by ENO, when there would surely have been many English, or other, singers well capable of taking on the role.

Madama Butterfly, English National Opera, 21 October 2013

(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.