The sound of tuning from an orchestra pit has never been so welcome as it currently is in Glyndebourne. In August this was one of the first UK opera companies to resume operations by performing outdoors; now it’s ahead in the move back into the theatre, bringing this summer’s production indoors to the main stage, and performing it to a safely spread-out, reduced-size audience. There’s a thrown-together, on-the-hop feel to it – the set is clearly a raid on the company’s store house – but it’s a full staging, with first-rate singers and a small but polished orchestra kept on its toes by the conductor Ben Glassberg. That’s several causes for celebration right there.
Admittedly, it’s possible to be glad of all that and simultaneously wish that Glyndebourne had lavished all that care and enthusiasm on a sturdier piece. In the Market for Love is Stephen Plaice and Marcia Bellamy’s updated, translated adaptation of Offenbach’s Mesdames de la Halle, a flimsy one-acter from 1858 with a genial but unmemorable score and a plot thinner than onion skin. The Mesdames, three stallholders who all find themselves in the running to be Ciboulette’s long-lost mother, are two tenors and a baritone, in drag. The Halle is Paris’s Marché des Innocents, but in Stephen Langridge’s staging a king-size bottle of hand sanitiser stands in for its famous fountain. Matthew Rose’s booming Police Inspector gleefully enforces ever-changing social distancing rules. Sooner or later almost everyone falls into the Brussels sprouts.
It’s not exactly sophisticated, but the principals and tiny chorus sell it to us, and it’s an especial treat to hear Nardus Williams’s gleaming, agile soprano as Ciboulette, and Kate Lindsey is luxury casting as her goofy, wannabe-cool love interest. Perhaps next month’s semi-staged Magic Flute will feel more like classy, tasteful Glyndebourne business as usual; for now, it’s good to be back in the theatre.
In the Market for Love runs until 25 October.
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