For its French premiere at the Opéra de Paris, Thomas Adès’ The Exterminating Angel has been given a makeover: out goes the tame staging of the work’s 2016 world premiere in Salzburg, in comes the caustic extravagance of Calixto Bieito. We certainly had high hopes that these two venom-spitting characters would get along... but we could hardly have expected their symbiosis to be such a masterstroke! The British composer’s third and latest opera may only last two short hours, but to bring to life the tight, uninterrupted action of its score of characters is no mean feat.
In the Calle Providencia, at the end of performance of Lucia de Lammermoor, we see a vast reception room whose great pale walls seem to foreshadow the pallor of the corpses that will wallow there. The hall is being prepared to receive its castaways: our host and hostess, Edmundo and Lucía de Nobile, and a dozen guests drawn from the Mexican elite. Against all rationality, a mysterious force will keep them there for days, during which it will shatter the veneer of convention. “This is it. Barbarity, violence, filth”, Lucia will rightly declare in Act 3. That’s it for the plot of this suffocating show within locked doors, directly inspired by Luis Buñuel’s film of the same name.
On stage, it's a plunge into symbols, like an immersion into a Dalí painting (somewhere between The Great Masturbator and Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate) whose details are not worth going into: like Buñuel, Bieito expunges any sense of logic from his work. Tonight, therefore, the Opéra Bastille is the preserve of dreams, mystery and unbridled surrealism, implying a Freudian reading of human relationships. While the confinement puts souls to a severe test, the collective superego fractures to the exclusive benefit of the id and its procession of impulses: sex and violence guide the actions of these satyr characters – with the single exception of the doctor Carlos Conde, affixed to his rationality like a limpet to its rock.
The psychological canvas gives added eloquence to the biting critique of the bourgeoisie which oozes from this radical and sulphurous Exterminating Angel, tonight less a social satire than a veritable staged pamphlet, much in the vein of 2022 Cannes Palme d'Or winner Triangle of Sadness. With the only sets being a few chairs around a richly laid table, Anna-Sofia Kirsch uses a thousand tricks to make the scene visually hypnotic. An equal contributor to this morbid hypnosis is the lighting of Reinhard Traub, which provides the characters with temporal markers while simultaneously, by means of colour, underlining the key elements of the drama.
The orchestral tour de force that makes these two hours behind closed doors so engrossing confirms Adès’ place in the elite of contemporary opera composers. As fascinating (because of its noxious atmosphere) as it is asphyxiating (because of the composer's implacable baton), the flow of this opera across three acts allows the audience little respite. There are many influences – at times Don Giovanni, when Señor Russell returns from beyond the grave shrouded in trombones; at times Wozzeck, with the child Yoli outside the collective madness; at other times, Janáček, with his sharp-edged vocal lines and broken arcs. But above all, the score is admirable for its individuality: between cosmic high notes and telluric grumbling, the composer puts all his talent at the service of the expressiveness and dramatic demands of Tom Cairns' libretto.
As well as using the bells of the Last Judgement and the drums so dear to Buñuel, the idea of using the ondes Martenot as a manifestation of the angel is stunning; the unreal sound of the instrument renders impalpable and volatile the supernatural force hidden in the smallest recesses, behind every fold, and which, acting as a link between the world above and the world below, unifies the stage and the auditorium. Rarely have the boundaries between reality and fiction been so porous as they are in this production with its ambiguous contours and play-within-a-play elements, which seems to spill out of the proscenium and invade the fourth wall. The spectacular finale subtly suggests that the audience is indeed the thirteenth guest of the evening, so don't expect the audience to escape the vitriol of Adès and Bieito.
Last but not least, the cast is a marvel both vocally and dramatically. Of particular note are the intensity and stamina of Jacquelyn Stucker's possessed Lucía, the stratospheric high notes of Gloria Tronel in her Prima Donna role and Claudia Boyle's widow Silvia, as irritating as she is touching. Among the men, while countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo is truculent in the pathetic role of Francisco, the other side of the spectrum is occupied by Paul Gay's virile bass-baritone, a lecherous and terrifying maestro. The power of Nicky Spence who, as a worthy houseguest, manages to impose silence in the midst of the collective hysteria, will finish by shaking to its foundations an audience already won over by this top-notch cast. Add to all this a Paris Opera Orchestra and Chorus on top form, and you have the undisputed highlight of the season for the Grande Boutique. The uppercut will leave its mark!
Translated from French by David Karlin
