Surrealist romp has a hint of Monty Python
An exasperating fellow, Stefan Herheim.
This Norwegian opera director based in Germany was responsible for one of the most moving and imaginative productions I have ever seen – a richly beautiful and resonant
Parsifal at Bayreuth – but I’d put his perverse Pelléas et Mélisande at Glyndebourne this summer on my list of all-time pretentious clunkers, and I was no great fan of his over-egged Meistersinger at Salzburg or baffling Vêpres Siciliennes at Covent Garden either.
Now Edinburgh International Festival has imported his version of Rossini’s La Cenerentola from Opéra de Lyon, and it grates. A capacity audience may have laughed and cheered at its more colourful and farcical aspects, but I can’t have been alone at feeling frustrated and irritated by its manic hyperactivity and determination to avoid the obvious. Why can’t Herheim leave well alone?
Part of the problem seems to be his reliance on a dramaturge – an intellectual adviser, whose ideas are filtered into the conception behind the staging. His name in this case is Professor Alexander Meierdörzenbach, and should you wish for elucidation of the deeper implications of La Cenerentola, he has contributed a 13-page essay on the subject to the programme. Although I daresay it is hugely interesting, I didn’t read it – partly because there was such a queue at the bar that I didn’t have time but mostly because I think a performance should make a statement on stage unbuttressed by preliminary lectures.
La Cenerentola tells the story of Cinderella, eliminating the magical elements that marks its usual pantomime incarnation. It bears a simple moral message – fortune will ultimately favour the good, the generous-hearted and the patient – and as Peter Hall’s wise production at Glyndebourne eloquently attests, the opera makes effortless sense when presented realistically as the story of a virtuous girl, persecuted by her ambitious step-sisters after her mother dies, who finds true love with a nobleman unimpressed by worldly glamour. Such things do happen.
But Herheim and his Herr Professor are too clever, too cynical, to swallow anything as naive as that. They see the whole thing as a surrealist romp, unattached to any specific period or location, overtly theatrical and devoid of the light-touch geniality that is the essence of Rossini’s humour.
Flat-footed Monty Python-esque gags abound: chorus members are dressed as cartoon obese Rossinis, the conductor shouts mock-abuse, the scenery is in constant motion, and no holds are put on over-acting. Cenerentola becomes a rather nasty piece of work – grasping, manipulative and hypocritical, grandstanding her arias like a spotlight-seeking diva and crowing over her marital triumph. In spectacular designs by Herheim himself, Daniel Unger and Esther Bialas, it’s certainly an eyeful, but one that left me battered and befuddled rather than charmed or amused.
An able cast attacked it hammer and tongs. As required, Michèle Losier played the title role as hard as nails. Taylor Stayton as her prince coped stylishly with the high-wire tenorial acrobatics of Si, ritrovarla io giuro.
When not required to lark about, Stefano Montanari proved an excellent conductor, feeding the music swing and sparkle and drawing vivacious playing from Opéra de Lyon’s orchestra. In the pit, Rossini was honoured; on stage, he was travestied.