Norma, Opera North, Grand Theatre, Leeds, review

Norma by Opera North at the Grand Theatre, Leeds, packs a punch in Christopher Alden's production.

Soprano Annemarie Kremer in the opera's title role
Vivid performance: soprano Annemarie Kremer in the opera's title role Credit: Photo: Alastair Muir

Norma Opera North/Grand Theatre, Leeds

With its sculpted melodic lines, richly characterised heroine and a final scene of neoclassical grandeur, no Italian opera of the early nineteenth century can match the intensity or nobility of Bellini’s Norma. But bringing it to theatrical life isn’t so easy.

Nominally set in Gaul during the Roman occupation, its lineaments traced by Euripides’ Medea and Racine’s Phèdre, the drama offers strong resonances with modern crises of colonialism and sexual politics: the formidable Druid priestess Norma is a morally culpable collaborator, guilty of a secret liaison with the Proconsul Pollione, himself a mangy love-rat two-timing her with one of her younger and prettier subordinates. You could set it in Vichy France, you could set it in the Belgian Congo.

At Opera North, the director Christopher Alden hasn’t travelled that far. He envisages the Druids as a tree-hugging pagan community in the American outback, circa 1850. Pollione is a top-hatted Victorian gent straight out of Victorian melodrama, perhaps a tax collector from Washington DC.

The basic concept is cogent and plausible (Ancient Gaul would only evoke Monty Python) even though Alden lards it over with baffling and occasionally ludicrous detail: Norma and Adalgisa resort to some steamy lesbian action during their first duet, Norma’s father Oroveso appears to be in on his daughter’s illegitimate sons from the start, and Pollione’s chum Flavio suffers a gratuitously nasty debagging. As so often with Alden’s work, one feels that less would have meant more.

But the staging is always alive, energised and absorbing. The way in which the community seems to lose faith in itself after Norma’s revelation makes for a powerful climax, and Alden has drawn a strikingly vivid performance from the Dutch soprano Annemarie Kremer in the title-role.

Kremer plays Norma on the brink, a woman at the mercy of her passions, unstable in all her relationships. Although the voice isn’t ideally beautiful or full-toned and her coloratura is imprecise, the commitment is total.

Keri Alkema’s Adalgisa doesn’t present enough of a vocal contrast – something more girlish is required – but she sings with assurance. Luis Chapa struggles as the pusillanimous Pollione (an ungrateful assignment); James Creswell makes a magisterial Oroveso. Oliver von Dohnanyi is an aggressive flat-footed conductor who doesn’t seem to like this music much.

So this isn’t a Norma for anyone fastidious about bel canto finesse. But it certainly packs a punch.

Until Feb 17 February (box office 0113 2453 9999), then touring to Nottingham, Salford and Newcastle