Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, Saturday 22 May 2004

Scottish Opera’s production of La bohème

IF BELEAGUERED  Scottish Opera are still hoping to persuade politicians of the company’s real merits, then this new production makes an ideal calling card. Vivid, gripping, accessible and imaginative, it has all the hallmarks of a company working at the top of its form. Certainly, by comparison with Scottish Opera’s last Puccini offering in Inverness, a dowdy production of Madame Butterfly, indifferently performed, this might have been a different company altogether.

As opera-goers of a conservative disposition will already be aware, this is an ‘updated’ production, where the Bohemians’ garret has become a SoHo loft, Café Momus turns into New York’s MOMA, Marcello is a video artist, and Rodolfo writes magazine articles and film scripts.

But the wary should remember that there are two very different kinds of updating. In the first the producer uses the opera’s libretto as little more than a framework on which to hang his or her own personal or political obsessions.  In the second, the updating presents the opera in a sharper focus, its meanings teased out and its emotions clarified.

Director/designer Stewart Laing definitely belongs to this second school.  Last year, his stunning Tosca for Umeå Opera, in northern Sweden, transferred the action to a present-day Latin American state in the grip of a right wing theocracy. Revolution, torture, corruption and sacrifice took an a terrifying immediacy.

His new version of La Bohème is not so radical—after all the musical Rent has already moved the opera into a similar milieu—but it has the same effect of restoring a much loved Old Master—years of varnish and grime have been removed to reveal the harsher, brighter, truer colours of the original.

Laing also has a canny sense for coups de theâtre, and there are a number of moments in this production which produce gasps of delight from the audience. These are never used simply for effect, however, but to heighten the impact of the storyline and delineate characters more clearly.  The surtitles update the original libretto with considerable wit, but such is the clarity of the staging that for much of the time they’re hardly necessary.

Of course, all of this would mean little if the performance was weak.  Fortunately, this production is blessed with a uniformly strong cast.  Peter Auty and Rachel Hynes as Rodolfo and Mimi may not have the largest of voices, but in a smaller theatre like Eden Court they sound just right, and they bring considerable sensitivity and musicality to their roles.

I can’t remember ever seeing Rodolfo’s fellow artists being so strongly characterised and differentiated, and Musetta’s transitions from lush through tramp to anxious friend are beautifully caught by Rebecca von Lipinksi.  It says something for the strength of opera in Britain today that all but one of the young cast are native-born and trained.  Standing in for an indisposed Richard Farnes, Scottish Opera’s chorusmaster Piers Maxim showed an unerring feel for the natural ebb and flow of Puccini’s music, and drew some beautiful playing from the Scottish Opera orchestra.

The Anglo-Saxon world is often too ready to confuse sentiment with sentimentality.  This La Bohème shows just how Puccini cuts through to the essence of our emotions with the precision of a master surgeon. Mimi’s Act 4 death scene is possibly the most famous tear-jerker in opera, but in this production it is the absolute reality of death, loss, and regret for things left unsaid and undone, which leaves not a dry eye in the house.

If this is what Scottish Opera at its best can achieve—a theatrical experience that is direct, moving and (yes) relevant—then what does it say about the confidence of a devolved Scotland if we can’t afford to sustain such work?

La Bohème is at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre on 15, 17, 19 June 2004 (matinee), 22, 24 and 26 June 2004.

© Robert Livingston, 2004