Well, if nothing else, those of us who had a sheltered upbringing know a lot more about the mechanics of taking heroin after seeing English National Opera’s new Puccini production. In Benedict Andrews’s present-day staging the two lovers have barely met before Rodolfo, clearly a seasoned junkie, has the belt tightened around Mimi’s arm and the needle in her veins. His excuse for not joining his friends — “just a few more lines to finish” — acquires a whole new meaning.
He and Mimi spend the rest of Act I lolling around the floor. No wonder Zach Borichevsky’s top notes sound parched, though Corinne Winters somehow manages to project delectable sounds while hunched up with her back to the audience.
So do we gather that Mimi’s fatal illness is a heroin addiction instigated by Rodolfo? Her changing appearance through the acts, from naive, trainers-shod teenager to ashen-faced Amy Winehouse lookalike, certainly suggests that. And when Rodolfo’s flatmates disappear in Act IV to buy Mimi some “medicine”, they return with more heroin, which they proceed to heat in a spoon over a candle while she expires — thus both upstaging and undermining the most touching death scene in opera.
That’s not the only crass stagecraft. On first night the Café Momus scene, bizarrely staged in a surreal shopping mall with permanently peripatetic walls, climaxed with an ENO stage manager desperately trying to shunt one of the crazily revolving bits of Johannes Schütz’s set into the wings.
The frustrating thing is that Andrews — a young Australian who did a terrific Monteverdi Ulysses for ENO four ago — has some good ideas. The four guys are credibly young, modern, laddish and hopelessly shallow when confronted with the consequences of their actions. And I like the ruse of having schoolchildren playing on swings and roundabouts outside the big industrial windows of the bohemians’ trendy warehouse pad as the tragedy of Act IV unfolds. It suggests that the gap between childhood innocence and death by substance abuse is frighteningly small.
Advertisement
Musically the show is dominated by Winters, whose sound is far bigger and more burnished than her waif-like frame might suggest. Around her, though, the voices are worryingly variable. Borichevsky sounds rather as his Rodolfo looks: gangling and undernourished. Duncan Rock is a solid enough Marcello, but the other bohemians are nothing special and Rhian Lois’s shrill, underpowered, caricature of Musetta never displays the charisma to suggest why she has a string of men dangling at her fingertips.
In fact, the most characterful performances come from Simon Butteriss, playing both rancid old Benoît (“I’m sixty but sexy!”) and Musetta’s long-suffering sugar-daddy. And I mean long-suffering; at one point she grinds her stiletto heel, dominatrix-style, into his groin. It’s that kind of show: a low-rent Rent. At least there’s a bit of old-fashioned romantic feeling in the orchestral playing coaxed by the conductor Xian Zhang.
Box office: 020 7845 9300, to Nov 26