La Voix humaine/Dido and Aeneas, Opera North, Grand Theatre, Leeds, review

Voix: Four Stars

Dido: One star

Twenty years ago, Lesley Garrett was an energetic and versatile soubrette at the London Coliseum, where her vivacious performances in the likes of The Cunning Little Vixen and Xerxes gave pleasure to many.

But discounting an unhappy stint in a ghastly production of The Merry Widow in 2005, she hasn’t sung a full opera on stage for well over a decade, concentrating instead on lucrative activities as a miked musical entertainer and television personality, focused on show songs and pop ballads rather than classical arias.

Now, at the age of 57, she has returned to her musical roots in her native Yorkshire, singing Elle in Poulenc and Cocteau’s La Voix humaine for Opera North’s spring season.

It’s a canny choice. This is a 40-minute monologue in which a distraught middle-aged woman clings to the last shreds of a love affair via a telephone call interrupted by broken connections and crossed lines.

Although it can easily seem merely camp and hysterical, it can also be made moving and familiar: most of us have been at one end of that telephone or the other, and it’s not one of life’s nicer experiences.

Poulenc’s music deftly embodies the muddle of self-dramatising and genuine anguish, and since it offers them a chance to show off histrionic skills without posing any technical hurdles (no testing high notes, nothing sustained), sopranos of a certain age embrace it as an opportunity for a last tour de force.

Framed by Aletta Collins’s sensitive staging (in which the perfidious gentleman makes ghostly appearances via a two- way mirror), Garrett’s performance is excellent. She shapes the emotional trajectory intelligently, her diction is exemplary and she resists the cheap temptation to chew the carpet.

After 30 years in the business, she hasn’t got much voice left, but she husbands her limited resources skilfully and sings in tune. I was left regretting the waste of a talent which in my view took an early wrong turning.

The less said about the travesty of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas which followed the better. Although it is intended to develop the theme of the forsaken female, Collins’s perverse decision to update the scenario to a modern minimalist hotel suite leaves it vacuous. Pamela Helen Stephen made an impassioned Queen of Carthage, but Wyn Davies’s conducting is leaden and unidiomatic. The net effect is horrid: Opera North must stop this sort of thing.

Until Feb 23, then touring to Newcastle, Salford, Belfast, Nottingham. Tickets: 0113 243 9999; operanorth.co.uk