UK Edition
Review
Pelléas et Mélisande is a masterpiece of nuance and atmosphere: review
Debussy's only complete opera is never easy to produce: its score is of such exquisite delicacy and volatility that the drama it embodies can seem evasively fey and bloodless. The plot may follow that most familiar of paths - two male rivals destroyed by love for a woman who can't be trusted or possessed - but both Maeterlinck's text and Debussy's music seem to inhabit a hall of mirrors in which expectations of ordinary reality disintegrate. Should a director reduce the poetry by specifying a social context or sacrifice emotional credibility by keeping it all misty and dreamy?
By some theatrical alchemy, David McVicar manages to transcend the problem by doing neither. What he has created for Scottish Opera might just be the best thing he's ever done and it will certainly rank in my book alongside Peter Stein's legendary staging of the work for WNO in 1992.
It looks very beautiful: McVicar's designer Rae Smith has drawn on the hauntingly quiet and vacant paintings of Vilhelm Hammershøi to suggest a late Victorian rural scene, shrouded by birch trees, in a walled setting that serves seamlessly to evoke both interiors and exteriors. Each scene is presented discretely [sic], allowing us to listen to the wonderful orchestral interludes in blackout. The dusky light is silvery or coppery, water sits blackly stagnant, foliage clings over-grown: this is a place of secrets and silences, a deathly place.
Yet the production offers much more than striking atmosphere. McVicar can be relied on to provide attractive and effective spectacle, but what is exceptional here is his intensely nuanced focus on repressed feelings and unspoken motives, particularly in relation to the breakdown of Golaud and Mélisande's relationship: an episode in their marital bed is revelatory.
Stuart Stratford's conducting is thrillingly febrile and impassioned - the colours are richly painted and nothing is held back, occasionally to the detriment of the text. Perhaps voices slightly less mature than theirs would be ideal for the title roles, but both Andrei Bondarenko and Carolyn Sampson give performances of consummate sensibility and grace. Forceful of voice, Roland Wood is the most pitiable of Golauds, and Alastair Miles (Arkel), Anne Mason (Genevieve) and Jonathan May (the Physician) are eloquent presences. Most heart-rending is Cedric Amamoo as le petit Yniold, a constant presence here, the victim and survivor of a tragedy that has no mercy on the innocent.
Box office 0844 871 7647 until 4 March; then touring to Festival Theatre, Edinburgh (0131 529 6000), 7-11 March