Madam Butterfly review – brutal realities edge out the romance in stark new WNO staging

Welsh National Opera has gone from iconic to deliberately iconoclastic. Joachim Hertz’s long-lived 1978 staging of Madam Butterfly has been replaced with Lindy Hume’s new production, in which Japan and Japonisme is passed up in favour of an “imagined biosphere”, a service-sector for the pleasures of the wealthy. Hume’s lightbox set brings into sharper focus not simply the sexist mores where Cio-Cio-San is a commodity, but the supremacist, imperialist and colonialist attitudes in the characters embodying male entitlement and coercion. At its core, Puccini’s opera has always been shocking: callous Pinkerton joy-rides his way into a deal based on the trafficking of young girls; Butterfly’s desperate need to buy into the marriage fantasy is just as uncomfortable. But Hume’s approach makes for a more disturbing experience than the romantic pull-at-the-heartstrings this work is assumed to be.

Softened only briefly by a video-cloud of fragile butterflies, the minimalist, hard edges of designer Isabella Bywater’s central white-cube house – set on a revolve – are mirrored by the severe lines of the costumes, part-utilitarian, part space-age Courrèges. With Butterfly’s bridal attire making her cut an almost grotesque figure – the skirt is nothing so much as a frilly vulva – the disjunct between the signing of a sexual bargain and Puccini’s moments of tenderness is total.

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In the title role, Joyce El-Khoury (who alternates with Alexia Voulgaridou) was steely secure, if somewhat uneven, as if conflicted between the girly tones of Butterfly when insecure and the more assertive demeanour when she could let rip with the sound. Leonardo Caimi (alternating with Peter Auty)’s fine tenor made credible Pinkerton’s anguish at the realisation of his duplicity, and Mark Stone brought to the consul Sharpless a sense of the impotence of his diplomacy. Anna Harvey portrayed a stressed-out Suzuki, the household not neatly ordered: the touching domestic scene is when, with Butterfly’s small son, they decorate a wall to welcome his father back.

The concept is slickly delivered, but the redeeming emotion of the evening comes from the WNO orchestra, with conductor laureate Carlo Rizzi alert to every nuance and drawing out lustrous playing.