Madam Butterfly
OperaUpClose got off to a flyer last year with their vibrant,
long-running Kilburnisation of La Bohème. Now well into their
Islington residency, the company’s repertoire has expanded rapidly, with
Hansel and Gretel imminent and the intriguing prospect of
Mark Ravenhill’s take on Monteverdi’s Poppea lined up for
April. With such a busy programme, ‘London’s Little Opera House’ was bound to catch
a cold somewhere along the way, and here it is.
In relocating Madam Butterfly to the
world of contemporary Thai ladyboys, director Adam Spreadbury-Maher jettisons
not only the gender of Puccini’s heroine but also the credibility of her final
sacrifice. In this version Butterfly’s obligations to a child who is
(inevitably) not her own are dictated not by blood but by custom, so why on
earth does she kill herself? If the audience cannot identify with her actions
it’s a tragedy built on quicksand.
Neither the staging nor the direction offers much to the
players, all of whom in the cast I saw (there are three, alternating) sing
proficiently or better. The absence of any sexual chemistry between Butterfly
and Pinkerton (a stolid Mario Sofroniou) is curious, given the titillating
premise of Spreadbury-Maher’s concept. As for the ladyboys, mostly played by
western women, the lack of any attempt either to androgynise or ‘easternise’
their characters leaves us disorientated in every sense of the word.
The enterprise is ill-advised from start to finish. Laughs
are cheaply won as operatic voices intone banalities: ‘awesome’, ‘asshole’,
‘American Airlines’. Alas, Jerry Springer the Opera got
there first. Even bigger laughs greet the appearance of Butterfly’s son as an
eerie, strapping Pinocchio puppet in a Scooby-Doo tee-shirt. The interpolation
of ‘One Night in Bangkok’ from Chess is not only crass, it
reminds us that musical theatre has already given Madam Butterfly
a perfectly good makeover in Miss Saigon. This version is
superfluous.
One conspicuously strong performance saves the production
from total disaster. Margaret Cooper could carry the role of Cio-Cio San in any
opera house; she has a superb voice, magnetic eyes and stage presence to spare.
I cannot vouch for Cooper’s fellow Butterflys but on this showing she, well
supported by Elspeth Wilkes’s discreetly secure musical direction, earns the
show a second star.
– Mark Valencia
