US Edition 
The Pearl Fishers, ENO, review: 'a lame show'
The director, Penny Woolcock, unwittingly emphasises the pure hokum of Bizet's opera, The Pearl Fishers, says John Allison
Putting on the opera best known for the “Pearl Fishers Duet” can look a little pointless if you don’t have a couple of pearl fishers up to the job. So it is optimistic of ENO to build its revival of Bizet’s second most famous opera around John Tessier as Nadir and George von Bergen as Zurga.
Neither have the sumptuous tone or vocal amplitude required to fill London’s biggest theatre with anything like the sound that audiences expect in this operatic soundbite.
Here the duet, “Au fond du temple saint”, is the evening’s low point, but blame must be shared with the director Penny Woolcock. The men’s acting is also particularly stilted in this number, though who can blame them for a lack of conviction when they are at the centre of a lame show?
Von Bergen’s baritone is focused enough, yet it is not until the final act that he projects it with authority. Tessier uses his tenor musically in the almost equally famous solo, “Je crois entendre encore”. Though his somewhat colourless tone might pass as authentically French, as the aptly named Nadir (a low point in 19th-century operatic characterisation) he has little chance of creating an appealing figure, as he managed to do with Nemorino in ENO’s Elisir a few years ago.
A feeble libretto and flimsy plot may have encouraged Bizet to squander his best music early on, but there are further obstacles to enjoying the rest of the score here. Jean-Luc Tingaud’s rough-edged conducting pays little attention to texture, so important in French music. The clunky translation makes Bizet’s already predictable cadences sound tamely Victorian.
The musically unresponsive Woolcock (her only other operatic work has been with John Adams, where tone-deafness is no obstacle) unwittingly emphasises the pure hokum of this work. She takes the work’s creators to task for their inevitably muddled, 1860s view of Ceylon - but rather than applying a simple corrective with her modern-day updating, she attempts to tick several other boxes, including climate change and capitalist exploitation of the Third World.
If only Bizet had written the world’s first eco-political opera… But he didn’t, and the piece collapses under the weight of this baggage. Dick Bird’s set transports us to a modern shanty town, where the walkways on stilts and corrugated shacks restrict the chorus’s movement. The crowds look as if they have stepped out of The Life of Brian: ironically, the show is more Pythone-sque than Terry Gilliam’s Benvenuto Cellini.
Woolcock has revised some of her 2010 staging. The gawping tourists have gone, to be replaced by a billboard advertising Sri Lankan holidays. More constructively, the Act III confrontation between Zurga and Leïla feels stronger for a new set - even if there is no solid reason for giving the head fisherman a file-strewn office.
Also on the plus side are Barnaby Rae, a powerful presence as Nourabad, and Sophie Bevan’s Leïla. A little thin of tone in Act I, she warms to her task as the distracted priestess and sings with appealing purity. ENO has cast at least one vocal pearl before this ungrateful critical swine.