Local, metropolitan perceptions of Madama Butterfly have in recent years been monopolized by two competing realisations. Anthony Minghella’s only opera production, the iconic Coliseum show first staged in 2005 and shared with New York, is visually ravishing but dramatically inert, while, at Covent Garden, Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier’s unobtrusive realisation is a template for subtler emotions. Both tendencies are explored discreetly at the Theatre in the Woods where a veteran director famous for his stripped-down production style revisits an opera he staged in minimalist fashion for previous incarnations of the present company. Country-house opera risks losing some of its charm when the rain is as heavy as it was on the first night of the run, but the production itself provides a still centre, food for thought in lieu of hedonistic recreation.
There is no curtain and no set. Mounted as if within a literal picture frame John Doyle gives us a silk screen backdrop: a lone tree, evocatively lit in gold for Act 1 and blue for Acts 2 and 3. A few packing cases doubling as desks or seating are strategically placed. Butterfly is clad initially in the gaudy period costume of a geisha, but costumes are otherwise muted and indeterminate, stage movement too limited to suggest anything reductively ‘oriental’. Some vaguely vampiric white make-up applied to Suzuki and the protagonist may or may not be perceived as overtly ‘Japanese’ from the cheaper seats. Not that there is anything wrong with sightlines or sound in the miraculous Theatre in the Woods.
In the pit verismo gush yields to Debussyan clarity. Stephen Barlow and the reduced forces of the Gascoigne Orchestra offer something other than warm-bath familiarity without short-circuiting the sentiment. Still the singing is key. Smaller parts well taken include Ross Ramgobin’s elegant if (deliberately?) somewhat faceless Sharpless and Jihoon Kim’s vocally resplendent Bonze. Adrian Thompson’s acrid, scheming Goro seems to have wandered in from a more extrovert production, leading one to wonder how much actual direction is involved in the singers’ characterisations. Portuguese tenor Luis Gomes has the right vibrant timbre as Pinkerton yet favours generic emoting without much inclination to tenderly softened tone. Then again, he is given little to ‘express’ by a director seemingly determined to pare down the physical. No mistaking the star of the show though. With her soprano now a little mature and vibrant for girlish antics, Hye-Youn Lee has the powerful pitch-perfect high notes and range of emotion to nail the mature, maternal Butterfly. Her moments of anger strike through with unexpected force. As is more typical of this show, the petal sprinkling of ‘Tutti i fior?’ is half-hearted (tempered by the scepticism of Kitty Whately’s Suzuki?). On opening night, the ‘Humming Chorus’ was not ideally refined. This will doubtless be corrected. Other oddities are presumably intrinsic to Doyle’s ‘essentialist’ vision. The opera has been both condemned for its cultural stereotyping and praised for its skewering of Yankee imperialism. Neither matters here where the child is real and affecting and nothing in the score is undercut by stage business.
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