US Edition 
The Carmelites, review
Rupert Christiansen is pleasantly surprised by Grange Park's production of Poulenc's masterpiece The Carmelites, the 'greatest opera written in his lifetime'.
I had misgivings as to the wisdom of presenting Poulenc’s masterpiece at a country-house opera festival: how would something so intensely harrowing, so focused on our deepest fears and loneliest uncertainties, play out before an audience of the pampered, in search of pleasure and conviviality?
But the power of the greatest opera written in my lifetime worked its magic: the tale of the Carmelite convent which collectively martyred itself during the Terror of the French Revolution enthralled us in a production by John Doyle that knocks spots off some of the pretentious directorial twaddle I have recently endured.
In a staging of exemplary clarity and simplicity, Doyle trusts the music and the singers to carry the drama, both external and internal. Liz Ascroft’s set, subtly lit by Paul Keogan, is little more than a white wall into which a bench has been built, broken by one jagged gash which serves as entrance and exit. The nuns are robed in shades of white; only the opera’s peripheral menfolk wear any other colour.
This is a world in which there is no avoiding either God’s justice or the Jacobins’ vengeance. The romantic aristocrat Blanche runs to the convent in the belief that the Carmelite Order will protect her from both: what she discovers is that it is she who must protect the Order. Life offers no hiding place.
In a small theatre such as Grange Park, the glare of this spiritual spotlight seemed even harsher, and there were moments when Stephen Barlow’s impassioned conducting became almost painfully loud and violent. But it was right that the screw was progressively tightened and its edges left sharp, making the unforgettable final scene in which the nuns walk to the scaffold chanting a Salve Regina as gratingly horrible as it should be.
I had a few minor reservations about some of the cast. Hye-Youn Lee sang Blanche cleanly and acted out her dilemmas dutifully, but I didn’t sense the girl’s quiveringly neurasthenic sensibility. As Mère Marie and Madame Lidoine, Sara Fulgoni and Fiona Murphy mushed up the French language.
But Anne-Marie Owens rose nobly to the shattering heights of the Old Prioress’s death scene, Nicky Spence was a stylish Chevalier de la Force, and Soraya Mafi (still a student at the RNCM) made an enchanting Constance – the one beacon of light in the encroaching darkness.
Until 12 July. Tickets: 01962 737366; www.grangeparkopera.co.uk