A colourful take on Puccini’s tale – but why set it in the present?
La Bohème
Festival Theatre
Man and boy, I’ve been coming to the Edinburgh International Festival for half a century now, and I can’t remember a better or more varied opera programme than this year’s. Huge congratulations to Fergus Linehan, the festival director and his team: can they do as well in 2018?
The current jamboree ends with performances of a production of La Bohème imported from Turin and directed by Alex Ollé, senior partner in the Catalan theatre collective La Fura dels Baus. It won me over, though I confess I am somewhat weary of seeing this opera casually updated to a modern metropolis.
The emotional force of Puccini’s concept rests in the idea that when you are young, you can be freezingly cold, seriously penniless and even gnawingly hungry, yet still have fun and dream lovely dreams. In 2017, when Rodolfo has a laptop and Mimi could have gone to A&E, the tragedy that befalls them doesn’t seem half so plausible or urgent.
Still, Ollé and his designer Alfons Flores impressively present today’s city as a skeletal structure of high-rise units in which it would be all too easy for individuals to feel dwarfed or alienated: is this Mimi perhaps a refugee, an illegal turned away from medical treatment for lack of the right documents?
Not that this is an altogether gloomy spectacle: the vision of the Caffé [sic] Momus is brilliantly animated, surrounded by a flea market and a parade of majorettes, and the Barrière d’enfer is in club-land, where Marcello is providing the wall of a hip venue with a Banksy-style mural as revellers reel out at dawn drunk but happy. There’s plenty of life and colour here.
Gianandrea Noseda conducts the fine orchestra of the Teatro Regio with great distinction. His reading is marked by a mercurial clarity that brought out instrumental details (especially in the folderol of the opening scene) that often get obscured in rougher-edged performances.
What we heard on stage didn’t quite measure up to what was heard in the pit, but it was good nevertheless. The Mimi, Erika Grimaldi, offered one of those slightly vinegary sopranos characteristic of the Italian school but she came into her own with an impassioned third act and a last scene coloured by a deathly pallor. Rodolfo, Giorgio Berrugi, was tight-voiced but effective and secure. Kelebogile Besong and Simone del Savio did good work as Musetta and Marcello.
The audience palpably loved every minute of the show. I liked it, too, but I would have been more moved had it been set in 1840.
Until Sunday. Tickets: 0131 473 2000. eif.co.uk