Andrew Clements 

Fairy tales that are true

Pélleas et Mélisande English National Opera, London Coliseum ****
  
  


Richard Jones's devastating staging of Debussy's masterpiece was first seen at Opera North in 1995. It's come to ENO with some of the same protagonists - Joan Rodgers is Mélisande, Robert Hayward Golaud, and Paul Daniel conducts - and fears that its force would be dissipated in the larger space of the Coliseum are triumphantly confounded. This reading remains unequalled in my experience for its emotional truth and dramatic concision; the music is paramount, and through it the tragedy unfolds remorselessly.

Anthony MacDonald's sets, rebuilt for the ENO, concentrate the action, making the distinction between the exterior and interior scenes with a series of perfectly lit stage pictures; his front cloth, which descends for all the orchestral interludes, is a seascape, on which a simple house casts the shadow of a castle.

That is the crux of this production; for all the fairy-tale trappings, it is an opera about real lives. This hyper-dysfunctional family, these characters with no past and no apparent future are living in a present that will repeat itself generation upon generation; as Jones shows in the final scene, what has befallen Golaud will be revisited upon his son Yniold, shown beside himself with de spair as Mélisande slowly dies.

The opera itself does not judge; there is no moralising, no apportioning of blame, and Jones avoids that, too. Rodger's gloriously sung Mélisande is not a frail victim, but a woman with an inner strength and firmness, while Hayward's wild-eyed Golaud doubts himself from the start. His admission in the first scene, "I too am lost" (not the most felicitous line in Hugh Macdonald's translation), is the key to the disaster, and Pelléas, sung by Garry Magee with increasing freedom and conviction, is the catalyst.

The rest of the cast is equally fine - an Arkel of exceptional interest in Clive Bayley, a Geneviève of understated concern from Rebecca De Pont Davies, a gut-wrenching Yniold from David Wigram. Daniel's exemplary conducting combines clarity and expressive freedom. He's done nothing finer at ENO; altogether this show is one of the company's finest recent achievements.

In repertory until April 8. Box office: 0171-632 8300

***** Unmissable **** Recommended *** Enjoyable ** Mediocre * Terrible

 

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