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Dialogue des Carmélites, Royal Opera House, May 2014.
'The action is arranged sparsely, stylishly and at times stunningly' ... Robert Carsen's production of Dialogue des Carmélites at the Royal Opera House. Photograph: Donald Cooper
'The action is arranged sparsely, stylishly and at times stunningly' ... Robert Carsen's production of Dialogue des Carmélites at the Royal Opera House. Photograph: Donald Cooper

Dialogues des Carmélites review – a production that leaves you with a lump in your throat

This article is more than 9 years old
Royal Opera House, London
A strong cast of singers and a sparse but stylish staging for Poulenc's opera about Carmelite nuns

Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmélites is a true one-off, an uneasy, sometimes queasy mixture of the sensual and the spiritual. Before the lights go down, it's easy to be flippant about an opera that ends with 16 nuns getting their heads chopped off. When the lights finally go up again, after the amplified swishes of the guillotine have silenced the nuns one by one, a good production leaves the audience, too, with a lump in the throat.

Robert Carsen's staging, first seen in Amsterdam in 1997 but only now brought to the Royal Opera, is such a production. If the evening as a whole still seems long, Carsen is not to blame; some of Poulenc's scenes linger beyond their usefulness to the story, which is based on an account of a real event during the French Terror. The set, designed by Michael Levine, is a vast grey box in which Carsen arranges the action sparsely, stylishly and at times stunningly. The execution scene is beautifully handled.

Dialogue des Carmélites, Royal Opera House, May 2014
Deborah Polaski as Madame de Croissy, 'a magnetic presence', and Sally Matthews, 'a good fit' as Blanche. Photograph: Donald Cooper

Carsen uses the crowd to create an undercurrent of menace – and thanks to the involvement of the Royal Opera's new community ensemble, that crowd is enormous. Jean Kalman's lighting plays a major role, sometimes throwing up telling effects – the shadow of a single footman picked out to loom above the crowd in the first scene, or the way in which Blanche appears to turn into a ghost before her disapproving father's eyes. But the old Prioress's death throes are too much in chiaroscuro for this scene to be as harrowing as it can be. Or perhaps it is that Deborah Polaski sings the role a bit too beautifully, when it needs a bit of screech. Still, she is a magnetic presence as the fierce old woman whose god deserts her at the last.

DIALOGUES DES CARMELITES, Royal Opera House
'Beautifully handled' … the execution scene at the opera's close. Photograph: Donald Cooper

Sally Matthews is a good fit in the central role, using her ripe soprano to create a Blanche who hides her puzzlement with the world behind a certain haughtiness. Anna Prohaska makes a shining debut as Constance, and Sophie Koch, Emma Bell, Alan Oke and Thomas Allen round out a strong principal cast. Yann Beuron, sounding indisposed, here wisely handed over after the interval to his understudy Luis Gomes, who brought a ringing tenor to the Chevalier's brief scene.

Simon Rattle is conducting the work for the first time, and the orchestra is the only element that is slightly underwhelming; Poulenc's wide-eyed harmonies sound beautiful, but the instruments are not always ideally blended, and the orchestra seems still to be trying on the style rather than inhabiting it. But, allied to this staging and this cast, it's enough.

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