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Nothing happens… London
Coliseum
03/23/2000 - and 25 March, 1, 3, 6, 8 April 2000
Claude Debussy Pelléas and Mélisande
Clive Bayley (Arkel), Rebecca de Pont Davies (Geneviéve), Garry
Magee (Pelléas), Robert Hayward (Golaud), Joan Rodgers
(Mélisande), David Wigram (Yniold), Roger Begley (Doctor), Andrew
Tinkler (Shepherd)
Paul Daniel (conductor), Richard Jones (director)
English National Opera Orchestra Pelléas and Mélisande risks theatrical disaster in the
Coliseum. The delicate music, like the symbolist text, creates space for
emotion and meaning rather than conveying them, but you can have too much
space to feel in. Maeterlinck's play, a sort of pre-Raphaelite Gormenghast,
traditionally has greenery-yallery decor and blank faces with light opaque
eyes. Richard Jones' production, with stunning black-and-white sets by
Antony McDonald, looks instead to the Symbolists' affinity with Edgar Allen
Poe, and introduces a pervasive horror that reaches out into the house.
Paul Daniel and the ENO orchestra deliver the music with austere clarity
that emphasises the isolation and pain of the characters.
The singer's voices provide all the sensuality, pretty much all the life,
in the opera. Joan Rodgers as Mélisande, a distraught vampire with
long red hair that was the only nominally warm colour in the set, was
sometimes lush and sometimes close to hoarse with anguish. Garry McGee's
largish tenor was not quite heroic, only occasionally sweet, but definitely
expressive. His Pelléas was probably not very bright and painfully
confused. Robert Hayward was a sinister, violent Golaud who often sang
beautiful. Even more paradoxical was Clive Bayley's ultra-doddery Arkel,
supine and waving his limbs helplessly like a cockroach as Golaud torments
Mélisande but singing gracefully and musically. Rebecca de Pont
Davies was a memorably bitter Geneviéve and David Wigram a cryptic
but innocent Yniold, totally destroyed by his family.
One of the triumphs of Richard Jones' production was to keep all the
characters in the frame at crucial points to bring home the claustrophobia
of the castle by the sea. The set represents it as a small house variously
transposed, with one window at the end that is lit up at the moment
Mélisande loses the ring in the well. The rooms of the castle also
appear as white cells, like a prison or Christ's tomb (an image also
suggested in the final scene by the white sheets and Golaud's shaggy hair
and beard). And everyone is trapped.
None of it made sense, but none of it was remotely ridiculous either. The
applause at the end was almost ecstatic, with cheers for the production
team as well as the singers. Perhaps it was a release after the exquisitely
controlled tension. Or perhaps it was acknowledgement of an amazing and
profoundly moving achievement in music theatre.
H.E. Elsom
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