Candide
Welsh National Opera, Cardiff

BONKERS and Monty Pythonesque are not words usually associated with opera but Welsh National Opera have put on an adaptation of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide that leaves the audience breathless.

The operetta is based on Voltaire’s satirical book and is one of the many versions of Bernstein’s quest to tell the complex and challenging story.

The content will upset and offend some and I am still unsure whether I should have had a more censorious reaction to it, but from the opening where animator Gregoire Pont’s drawings are projected onto a net curtain, I was hooked, along with most of the opening-night audience.

It is Pont’s animations which enable the complex story of Candide, sung and acted with panache by Ed Lyon, to be told despite his journeys to many different countries and through many complex scenarios, and which saves the trouble of set design and multiple changes of scenery.

Pont is a genius and his projected illustrations give the illusion that the many characters in this operetta are doing what they are supposed to be. 

One scene, for example, involving a journey on horseback of three of the characters shows the three getting on board an impossibly elongated horse and trotting along. Even more hilariously two of the singers become sheep simply by inserting their faces into the projected drawing of sheep.

But the subject matter is difficult and Claudio Boyle’s Cunegonde is told in one scene that she is either to be raped by soldiers or be killed. Her reaction is funny, but the subject matter is shocking and it takes a few moments to realise that we are laughing at the suggestion that a woman is to be raped.

This is very much the point of Voltaire’s satire and the philosophy espoused by the character of Gillian Bevan’s Pangloss, a philosopher and the teacher of Candide, Cunegonde and the other children in the tale.

His credo that everything that happens is for the best in the best of all worlds is tested to destruction as the characters have terrible things done to them.

But director James Bonas has gone for a comedic tone which works because the pace of the operetta is so frantic and impossible.

The singers become like cartoon characters and this is reinforced by the way they exist in a world projected as illustrations for them to move through.

Bernstein’s score is fantastic and the orchestra and cast of singers more than do it justice as Candide pursues his love across Europe and on to the New World and the mythical land of El Dorado.

The WNO orchestra are placed on the stage, but behind the net curtain that the illustrated scenery is projected onto, which gives the whole evening a surreal quality.

The genius of this device is that the opera can be performed in many different theatres without the need for huge sets to be transported.

Catch this while you can.

On tour until July 15, details: wno.org.uk.