Sign of the times: The Flying Dutchman in a box
Simple sets become rule in small houses
The Flying Dutchman: Romantic opera in three acts, if you consult the reference books. Expressionist opera in one box, if you see the last performance Saturday in Place des Arts by the Opéra de Montréal.
Not a bad box, mind you, with a giant industrial wheel and a spiral staircase generating existential overtones and grey slate walls making it clear that life is a weary business all around.
It is handy to have hooks on those walls when chairs need to be cleared from stage. Chairs hanging on the wall: They make a statement. And that holding area below the slanted floor is useful if you wish to equate the Dutchman crew with death-camp inmates, as the Canadian Opera Company did when it last presented this production by Allan Moyer in 2010.
What this or any other box cannot do is reflect in any valid way the settings indicated in Wagner’s libretto: A steep rocky shore for Act 1; a spacious room in Daland’s house for Act 2; a bay with a rocky shore for Act 3, with Daland’s house to one side in the foreground.
It is interesting to recall the last time the OdM (not exactly a Wagner-friendly house) presented The Flying Dutchman. That was in 1993. Sets were by Claude Girard. The director was Bernard Uzan, whom many of us criticized sharply at the time, and now miss like the dickens.
“One master stroke was the storm of the opening scene,” I reported in my review, “brilliantly conveyed by billowing sails and sailors zigzagging across the deck; another was the upstage entry of the famous ghost ship, its riggings creaking ominously and its sails glowing with the colour of blood.”
Verisimilitude, I then continued, was thrown overboard in the second act, which unfolded in “a spare interior with three gloomy, Freudian doors and a portrait of the Dutchman glowering from on high.”
Whatever the merits of this Uzan staging — in which the late Spiros Argiris led the OSM through an early version of the score — it had the old-fashioned advantage of different sets to represent different settings. There was a ship in Act 1; Act 2 was in a house.
Now such fundamental distinctions are harder to find. Instead, we get the one-stopshopping solution, a single set forced to do service for multiple acts and multiple settings. A few weeks ago, the COC tried to stage Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus as a one-off. How do you make the structural space work for a lavish Viennese ball and a jail? Curtains, curtains, curtains. Plus a little Sigmund Freud.
Directors can attempt to make a virtue of the one-set paradigm by imposing an abstract interpretation on the opera. When everything is a Freudian dream, anything goes. If alienation is the governing concept of The Flying Dutchman, then a director can justify, at least to his own satisfaction, the odd spectacle of ship captains hollering out to the audience from the same enclosed room rather than at each other from the decks of their respective ships.
Let us not be fooled here: Such conceptual expediencies do not have their source in an interpretive insight applied in good faith by a director (in this case, Christopher Alden) who has drawn cer- tain conclusions from a thorough analysis of the libretto and score. They are entailed by the monumental illogic of forcing a single set to serve vastly different settings.
Which situation is dictated in turn by the overarching need to keep costs down. Opera is a complex business. One set is not only cheaper to build, it is cheaper to transport and therefore to rent. It is cheaper to build because it requires fewer unionized stage hands. If the onstage concept can accommodate using choristers as stage hands, for light duty, at least, well, bravo all around.
Three-set presentations are not yet extinct. Big houses with big budgets can still build and mount them. But at the second rung of houses it is clear that sets are getting simpler every season.
The trend makes you wonder whether in time this process of operatic entropy will lead to the simplest state of all: opera in concert.