Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci's production of Puccini’s Turandot

Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci’s Turandot once again challenged the conventions of opera, merging the classical with the popular by adding għana and principles of street theatre to Puccini’s tale of passionate conquest. New to this year’s opera was the visual fragmentation of the story’s unfolding across three divided spaces, connected by monitors placed in each room. A cubist mosaic, the production offered multiple sight and auditory perceptions to the same subject. The whole piece, as a totality, was quite disturbing: fragmented scenes fragmented on monitors, commedia dell’arte principles interjecting into the narrative, a direct relationship with the audience, and għana acting as Greek narrator. Schembri Bonaci’s production combined Meyerholdian qualities with the Brechtian concept of de-alienation, disallowing an immersed self-identification with the plight of the protagonists because of intrusions by the actress, jazz music, and troubadour narrations. The work was an homage to the Gozzi-Goldoni conflict over Turandot’s method of rendition, later taken up by Vachtangov at the Vachtangov Theatre in Moscow.

More development would not go amiss. Such approaches to theatre warrant continuous return to ensure the evolution of ideas and engagement with theory-practice interrelations. Furthering integration of għana with the plot and characters was needed, whilst the use of monitors could have been exploited further to fully manifest the strength of the performers’ voices and acting. Schembri Bonaci strongly believes that one production paves the way to the next. He is driven by a perpetual dissatisfaction that necessitates constant improvement and reinvention; a vital, self-critical energy.

An intellectual Turandot, an entertaining performance. Beautiful and compelling, yet demanding on the audience. One can only but eagerly await Schembri Bonaci’s next production which will surely promise to improve upon previous efforts and open up new challenges with all their possible contradictions.

Award-winning Cambridge critic and writer Ateş Orga attended the performance and penned some insightful and constructive thoughts, necessarily reproduced here because of their fundamental contribution to the dialogue that art necessitates for growth and relevance.

In the Colonial period Strada Stretta – Strait Street – was the heart of Valletta’s jazz scene and red-light district. It’s a long, lamp-lit, narrow place (you can practically touch hands across the overhanging galleriji), draughts of sea breeze bringing warmth and chill equally. Nowadays it thrives on a crowded café culture, partying ‘til dawn, and a kaleidoscope of humanity from buskers and chancers to despairing lovers. A place of embraces, glances and first meetings, kisses for free. Largely surviving the Second World War, the many boardedup derelict buildings – a mixture of high sandstone walls, cracked doors, flaking paint, rotting sashes, rusting lattices, jagged window panes, shuttered secrets – create an extraordinary atmosphere. Some are being restored. Others are being rejuvenated. The Splendid, a bordello in times past, is one such, its scent and scene defined by distressed surfaces and crumbling architecture … a silent fireplace, bared wires … shadows, corridors, locked rooms. At the back there’s a window left half open, to let wander, they say, the ghost of a girl murdered in lust. Supported by the Valletta 2018 Foundation under the artistic curatorship of the university academic, fine art historian and philosopher Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci, The Splendid (The Strada Stretta Concept) has become a justifiably well-supported culture hub, providing an intimate venue for innovative creative expression in all areas of artistic life and community exchange.

Schembri Bonaci trained in theatre direction in Moscow, studying under Pyotr Fomenko. A determined individual of intricate thought and lexicographical mind, seeking new tensions, new connections, new psychological perspectives, forever gilding and coding the simple with unlikely, unthought of associations or derivatives, rarely content to leave anything untouched or unargued, happiest turning cadences into question marks, his productions inevitably challenge and defy. Purity, beauty, dissonance, provocation, black moods, mischief, restless wild-cards, the suddenness of the unexpected, calm winds turned into savage Mediterranean storms – all go into the cauldron that is his questing, grizzled personality.

Oscillating between high culture and the vernacular, his oneoff seventy-five-minute abridgement of Turandot, without interval, proved a journey offsetting the familiar with complex subtexts, its lyric soundworld one of Italian opera interposed with jazz breaks, local minstrelsy and English narrative links filtered through barroom piano, trumpets, saxophone and guitars. Puccini’s unfinished three-act score (192124) and Gozzi’s original commedia dell’arte play (1762), different in emphasis from Schiller’s moralistic 1801 re-reading of the plot produced in Weimar by Goethe, seed and steer the action. Circumventing Alfano’s ‘happy’ Act Three completion, the adaptation stops where Puccini left off.

Staging and lighting (naked walls, glowing candles) was economical; the costumes minimal (orientally evocative yoked sackcloths, dark lounge suits, white commedia dell’arte masks); the staging maximal - the scenes angled variously through three simultaneous acting/audience spaces (plus entrance hall, stairs and upstairs passageway), any two accessible through splitscreen monitors to any one audience).

Not every aspect worked, onward flow and the timing of pauses for one. The relative smallness of monitors for another – easier on occasion to focus on just a third of the material (the performance in the room we were immediately in) than tangle with an excess of dramatic information and flickering images. Striking, though, were the juxtapositions of language and musical vocabulary, between them generating a multi-timbre Turandot of deliberated, clashing experience – from Puccini’s notes transmogrified into American jazz to the vowel accentuations of the Maltese bormliza, two troubadours improvising unearthly, tightthroated, haiku- like melismas taking us to places, modes and tuning temperaments eerily alien to Western ears. But then is not Turandot a tale of Asian colours east of Byzantium …?

The principal roles were finely cast. As Turandot, Maryana Bodnar – tall, blonde, regal in posture and profile, haughtily beautiful, coolly penetrating of eye – epitomised the princess of the steppes “begirdled by ice”, Gozzi’s proud “tigerish woman”. Her presence was commanding, her delivery unrelenting. Mirjana Pantelic, warmer in spirit, portrayed Liù the forsaken slave-girl in softer, suppler light, for all her statuesque grace cutting a vulnerable figure trapped behind the bars of her prison (the slats of her leafless fan-like head-dress), with only death to come – the blacked-out final moment of the production, brutally sudden. “What is love? Love is sacrifice” (Schembri Bonaci). Creating the part of The Unknown Prince (Calaf), Charles Vincenti did all that was vocally required of him

Charles Vincenti as the Prince and Mirjana Pantelic as Liu.