Advertisement

REVIEW | Madama Butterfly

REVIEW | Madama Butterfly

OPERA
Madama Butterfly ★★★★½
His Majesty's Theatre | Review by William Yeoman

In Anthony Minghella’s 1996 film The English Patient there’s a scene where Sikh sapper Kip (Naveen Andrews) fastens Hana (Juliette Binoche) to a rope in a gloomy Tuscan chapel and hoists her high into the air so she can study the ancient frescoes by the light of a flare. It’s lovely, whimsical and utterly romantic.

In Minghella’s 2005 production of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly there’s a scene where newlyweds Pinkerton and Cio-Cio-San sing a soaring love duet amid lanterns held aloft by dancers and falling cherry blossoms. It too is lovely, whimsical and utterly romantic.

Perth audiences are at last able to marvel at the late British director’s refined yet emotionally charged cinematic sensibility in the context of live opera as he holds up a metaphorical flare to this much-loved work.

Puccini’s 1903 “tragedia giapponese” about a Japanese girl married to, then abandoned by, an American sailor had its premiere in Milan in 1904, as war raged between Japan and Russia. But the opera, with a libretto based on a David Belasco play the composer saw in London in 1900, is more critical of American imperialism and commercial interests in Japan.

Yet his appropriation of Japanese melodies (Puccini had records sent from Tokyo so he could transcribe some of the music) is also a form of cultural imperialism — as is, arguably, Minghella’s liberal take on Japanese aesthetics.

But there is much to marvel at. Scene changes are largely achieved through the fluid manipulation of coloured lighting and shifting Japanese screens.

Dancers and puppeteers clad from head to toe in black — more ninja aesthetes than ninja assassins — glide between these flexible spaces like the ghosts of long-dead ancestors or shadowy intimations of death itself, sometimes manipulating paper lanterns, origami birds or wooden puppets (Pinkerton and Cio-Cio-San’s sympathetically and warmly articulated puppet child is a special highlight) and throwing into even sharper relief the often gaudy traditional costumes of the vocal soloists and chorus.

All of this grows effortlessly out of Puccini’s sometimes lavish, sometimes spare, always organic score.

And the singing by an Australian and international team of soloists, including Minghella’s original Cio-Cio-San Mary Plazas (her Un bel di vedremo is a show stopper), Adam Diegel as Lt Pinkerton (superb throughout), Jonathan Summers as Sharpless the American consul and Maria Zifchak as Cio-Cio-San’s maid Suzuki is magnificent, as is that of the WA Opera Chorus — all accompanied by a sometimes overly loud WA Symphony Orchestra conducted by the original production’s English National Opera conductor David Parry.

As Julian Budden writes in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Cio-Cio-San is a “genuine figure of tragedy who proceeds during the action from childlike innocence to an adult understanding and a calm acceptance of the destiny which her code of honour enjoins upon her. Butterfly is the apotheosis of the frail suffering heroine so often encountered in Puccini’s gallery.”

In the same way, Minghella’s production of Madama Butterfly is the apotheosis of opera as the expression of human suffering through the orchestration not just of sound but of light, space and movement.
Don’t miss it.

Madama Butterfly is on at His Majesty’s Theatre until March 7. Book at Ticketek.