How do you mark the centenary of Giacomo Puccini’s death – with an old friend or a new one? Why choose, when you can have both.
The English National Opera opened their season this week with two Puccini operas on consecutive nights: the ever-popular La bohème, followed by less familiar one-act tearjerker Suor Angelica.
Billed as a semi-staging, the latter is as dramatically complete a show as you’ll see this year. ENO’s artistic director Annilese Miskimmon has drawn on her own family history and Irish upbringing to create a production that relocates Puccini’s tragic nun Sister Angelica – forcibly separated from her illegitimate baby and hidden away in a convent by her horrified relations – to the Magdalene Laundries of the 1960s.
It’s a transposition that generates a horrifying friction with Puccini’s most radiantly, rapturously beautiful score. Bells chime, upper voices (this is a rare all-female opera) hang suspended in gleaming clouds of harmony, while we watch a pregnant woman on her knees, another struggling to control her sobs as she’s stripped of clothes and possessions and reduced to another faceless member of the laundry production line.
Miskimmon pulls no punches, achieving absolute narrative clarity in a black box set thanks to Yannis Thavoris’s telling props: a cloudscape of hanging sheets, an altar-rail of sinks and ironing stations. Emotional clarity comes courtesy of her cast.
Soprano Sinead Campbell-Wallace (Angelica) is all stillness and sobriety, a human dam that suddenly bursts in the final scene; Madeleine Shaw is an unyielding, ungainly Abbess; Christine Rice’s Baroness is a picture of misguided virtue and quivering self-righteousness.
Puccini may have written a melodrama, but Miskimmon and conductor Corinna Niemeyer (coaxing such soft sheen from the ENO Orchestra) give us something else: a tragedy with a core of truth more brutal than any imagined horrors. What a shame no one else will get to see this one-night-only show, which deserves an encore.
And speaking of encores, Jonathan Miller’s jazz-age Bohème (now in its 15th year) is back for yet another outing, with plenty of swing in its hips thanks to a talented young cast led by American tenor Joshua Blue as a heartfelt, puppyish Rodolfo. If it’s all looking just a bit creaky these days, Miller’s lightly updated staging still hits all the important marks: bustling Parisian café scene, lively garret shenanigans, tragic death.
Say what you like about Puccini: 100 years on and he’s still got it. And then some.
