Il Tabarro/Suor Angelica review – Opera North illuminate Puccini's dark visions of loss and pain

Opera North mastered the art of the aperitif in 2004 with Eight Little Greats, an operatic taster season in which you could mix and match one-act masterpieces of less than an hour’s duration. David Pountney’s production of Il Tabarro by Puccini was one of the highlights – or low-lights, considering how gloomy it was – and is well worth a second look. But the real draw is the company’s first production of Puccini’s only all-female opera.

It could be argued that Opera North have missed a trick in not putting together all three of the dramatic panels Puccini conceived as a single entity in 1918 (the company does have a Gianni Schicchi in stock, which entered the repertoire last year). Perhaps a complete Trittico is still to come. But Michael Barker-Caven’s production succeeds in emphasising how these two short operas provide dual reflections on a single theme: the pain of a lost child kept alive in the memory of a loveless stevedore and a penitent nun.

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If Pountney’s concept for Il Tabarro was dark, Barker-Caven’s revival is, if anything, even darker; presenting this grubby tale of sexual jealousy among Parisian barge workers as if it were Puccini’s On the Waterfront. Giselle Allen’s Giorgetta smoulders with the circumscription of life “between the bed and the stove” (which in Johan Engels’s unremitting design is actually a dirty black shipping container); David Butt Philip unleashes a revelatory top end as her lover, Luigi; and Ivan Inverardi’s Michele prowls around in Brando-esque fashion, ominously muttering that he could have been a contender.

Barker-Caven is the artistic director of the Civic Theatre in Dublin and has spent most of his career in Ireland, so it is perhaps not surprising that his reading of Suor Angelica could be taken as a reflection on the miseries of the Magdalen laundries. The convent, in Hannah Clark’s design, is an iron-grey place full of the sound of suppressed desire and unanswered prayer. Jac van Steen’s conducting implies the sour undertow beneath the shimmer of pious flutes and seraphic strings; even the depiction of golden light playing in the cloister fountain has no sooner been established than it appears to curdle. The sense of loss is palpable.

Soraya Mafi sings Sister Genoveva’s sad recollection of her favourite lamb in terms that suggest that all of these women may have had their babies taken away from them. Patricia Bardon’s throatily sung, power-dressed Princess takes sadistic pleasure in informing her cloistered niece that she will never see her illegitimate son again – although the psychedelic video design that accompanies Angelica’s dying vision suggests otherwise. Anne Sophie Duprels is outstanding in the title role, despite delivering her big moment, Senza Mamma, face down on the floor. Among an impressive ensemble cast, there is simply nun finer.