Turandot, Northern Ireland Opera, review: 'pretentious and bathetic'

<br> After the gore and nudity in February's production of Salome successfully scandalised the front pages in the local press, Northern Ireland Opera has now gone one stage further, co-producing a version of Puccini’s Turandot directed by Calixto Bieito — of the notoriously lavatorial Masked Ball at ENO in 2002 and many other blood-and-guts, knickers-off saturnalia since.

The Catalan director makes strong visual statements, but the same unremittingly bleak vision is stamped on everything he does, with resort made to the same theatrical tropes and shock tactics in the process. There’s no sensitivity in his response to the music, and not much humanity either.

What makes Bieito's Turandot frustrating is that he has grasped the essential truth of the piece, without escaping from his own clichés. This opera isn’t just an orientalist pantomime; first performed in 1926, it is also a parable prescient of Italy’s descent to Fascism — the tale of a Big Sister dictator whose ruthless cruelty and ubiquity mesmerizes the masses and earns her the adoration even of those she seeks to destroy.

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Bieito and his designers duly evoke Maoist Asia. The set is made up of walls of cardboard boxes. The drones all wear the same blue suits, either standing in serried ranks or huddling in cowed terror. Ping, Pang and Pong are uniformed police; Calaf, Timur and Liu represent those who dare to challenge Turandot’s totalitarian authority.

So far so good: but as usual Bieito can’t resist reducing everything to a question of sex and violence. Ping, Pang and Pong are secret drag queens, wantonly abusing the innocent; Turandot’s demented father, wandering around in a nappy, is thrashed by his daughter in fury after Calaf unpicks the riddles; the wretched people of Peking fall victim to Bieito’s obsession with stripping everyone down to their underwear, and they get a good old whipping too.

Yet such images of cruelty provoke nothing more than faint embarrassment: it’s all so badly acted that any effort to horrify or disgust looks merely pretentious and bathetic. Terrible lighting, a general air of under-rehearsal and David Brophy’s loud, plodding and coarse conducting of the Ulster Orchestra confirm my suspicion that Northern Ireland Opera has waded out of its depth here.

The cast sings in English, without benefit of surtitles: William Radice’s translation is serviceable and audible. The chorus (mostly amateur or student, I suspect) sounds lusty. Ping, Pang and Pong are adequately taken, some of the smaller roles less so. Neal Cooper is a lugubrious Calaf, delivering a stolid “Nessun dorma”; in the title-role, Miriam Murphy, bafflingly costumed in a platinum blonde wig and trouser suit to resemble a floor manager at Debenhams, has the top register to carry the titanic climaxes of Act 2; Anna Patalong’s Liu warmed up to offer a sweet “Tu che di gel” before topping herself.

At which point the performance (played without an interval)  comes to an abrupt end, bleakly leaving a bald Turandot staring out into space as she pulls the limbs off a plastic doll. This honours the point at which the mortally ill Puccini stopped composing, and by eschewing the customary heavy-handed ending posthumously tacked on by Franco Alfano, Bieito gives the opera a haunting final twist — how can Calaf melt this block of emotional ice into a loving functional human being?

But the audience’s reception was tepid, and I was left feeling in schoolmasterly fashion that such a misguided project wasn’t good value for public money, least of all at a time when subsidy for the arts is scant.

Northern Ireland Opera must continue to be fresh and brave, but it needs to reassess its ambitions.


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