La Vida Breve/Gianni Schicchi review – disturbing, ingenious double bill

In 2004, Opera North gave over its spring season to one-act operas. Eight 19th- and early 20th-century works were toured, in sets designed by the late Johan Engels, with the productions shared between David Pountney and Christopher Alden. It was a hugely enterprising and generally successful venture, and the most hauntingly memorable of all the stagings was Alden’s production of Manuel de Falla’s bleak tragedy La Vida Breve. The company has now brought that back for the first time, in a double bill with a new version of Gianni Schicchi, also directed by Alden, and designed by Charles Edwards with Jac van Steen as the hugely competent conductor.

The Falla is every bit as disturbing as it seemed 10 years ago. Alden transplants the original paper-thin plot from the Gypsy barrio of Granada to a tatty garment factory that could be anywhere in Spain, and brings this enclosed corner of society, in which casual violence and swaggering machismo are the norm, to vivid, sordid life. The unbelievable original becomes all too real, with an ending that is horrifyingly ritualised. Anne Sophie Duprels is the pathetic, abused Salud this time around, with Jesús Álvarez as her selfish, preening lover and Daniel Norman as the transvestite worker whom Alden weaves into the story, and whose dismal fate adds another indelible strand to the tragedy.

After all that, Gianni Schicchi provides welcome relief. But for all the ingenuity and out-of-kilter wit, Alden’s take on Puccini’s immaculately geared and paced comedy is not totally successful. He updates it to a contemporary Italy of mobiles, tablets and laptops, and frames it with a nod towards the origins of the story in Dante’s Divine Comedy – the actor who depicts Dante in a silent prologue (Tim Claydon) then becomes the dead Buoso Donati, who haunts the action while his relatives squabble and connive over their inheritance.

After the introductory music-less mime show, though, it takes a while for the performance to really get into its stride. The arrival of Christopher Purves’s Schicchi, a minor gangster by the look of him, just a bit sinister, helps things along, and Jennifer France’s nicely judged performance of Lauretta’s famous aria is a predictable high point, but Alden’s glosses are often just too off-the-wall to keep the comedy going. It all seems a bit too contrived, though it might move more easily as the production gets run in.