There’s a nagging mystery in Jude Christian’s technically impressive staging of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut. If, as seems obvious throughout, she dislikes the work so much, why not turn down the assignment rather than apply corrective surgery to Puccini’s creation? She has not served English Touring Opera well by directing an indulgent reinvention for its spring season.
There are, nevertheless, good reasons why patrons around Britain should book for a production that tours nationally until the end of May. First, it continues new artistic director Robin Norton-Hale’s policy of giving each show a proper opera-house look. This one is generously cast with an outstanding chorus of young professional singers, all of whom have individual roles to play; set designs by Charlotte Henerey are fluid and inventive, loaded with visual felicities and soaked in Technicolor... indeed the entire spectacle brims with confidence.
As for the 27 instrumentalists under music director Gerry Cornelius, they played with the élan and amplitude of an orchestra twice its size. A few extra string players would have added some aural bloom but, to be realistic, given the constraints of an ad hoc tour band their sound and virtuosity did the composer proud.
Would Puccini have shaken Christian’s hand as warmly? It seems unlikely. Clearly discomfited by his affirmation of Manon’s victimhood, wherein a trio of self-interested men variously guide, misguide and exploit her, the director skews the story by shedding its romance in favour of neo-Dadaism. This was Manon Lescaut by way of Les Mamelles de Tirésias – dislocated from reality and fashioned from a succession of absurd and surreal mini-scenarios within a flow of abstract imagery and even a wink of an eye towards Dali and Buñuel's Un Chien andalou. In an opera with few jokes, the integration of some ancient “Manon! Let’s go!” wordplay within the English version was limp and distracting.
The reinvention would be fine had Puccini and his librettists Illica, Praga and Oliva not written a romantic opera. If the director had started from the four main characters, their truth and their psychologies, then built her scenario outwards from their given relationships, she could have been on to something; as it was, there was only one librettist credited in the programme, Jude Christian herself, and she was having none of it. Her decision to present the malevolent Geronte (Edward Hawkins, vocally excellent) as a ridiculous Gilbertian fop neutered his menace towards Manon and replaced the darkness of his character with frivolity.
Aidan Edwards sang powerfully as Lescaut, Manon’s brother (even though the production sidelined him amid the prevailing garishness) and all the minor roles were well taken, with Brenton Spiteri an ear-catching presence in his all-too-brief appearances as Edmondo. Jenny Stafford was a light-toned Manon, sweet on the ear but more a lyric than a spinto soprano, while as Des Grieux, her lover, Gareth Dafydd Morris had moments of real Italianate push. A pre-show announcement craved our forbearance as the tenor emerged from illness, but none was needed. Of greater concern was his inexpressive countenance, since an immobile face inevitably leads to colourless singing.
On top of an awkward production concept and a clinging, cocoon-like frock for the heroine, the lack of a credited movement director affected the physical depictions of both Manon and Des Grieux. Their scenes together might have given Christian’s production a chance to delve into character, but even a line like “Bring me to ecstasy!” loses lustre when the body doesn’t follow suit.
