The Stage

Madam Butterfly

Published Thursday 11 June 2009 at 12:25 by Edward Bhesania

As a tribute to the late Anthony Minghella, English National Opera revives the film director’s Madam Butterfly for the third time since its premiere only in 2005. Perhaps surprisingly, Minghella with his set designer Michael Levine resisted the temptation to recreate the opera’s turn of the 20th-century Nagasaki setting with lovingly detailed Japonaiserie. Instead we have a proliferation of plain sliding panels, bold, single-coloured backdrops and sliding panels. An overhead floating mirror offers another angle on the events, sometimes a sense of distance, sometimes a hidden view, but rarely, in fact, much of significance.

Drawing influence especially from Japanese bunraku puppet theatre, there is much visual intervention of jet black-dressed puppeteers, who choreograph globe lanterns during Pinkerton’s night under the stars with Butterfly, and wear blossom-jackets, plucked by Butterfly to decorate her home for what she thinks is Pinkerton’s homecoming. More controversially Butterfly’s three-year-old son is played by an expressive and quite magical puppet figure. There’s also a dream ballet in which a Butterfly puppet and male dancer act out Butterfly’s desperate path of love, rejection and death.

The visual feast, though, tends to distract from the emotional substance of the story, an impression not helped in this particular context by Brian Hymel’s portrayal of Pinkerton as something of a damp squib. With his voice tightening in its upper extremities, he was the only weak link in a very strong cast featuring Judith Howarth’s richly lyrical Butterfly, Christine Rice’s faithful Suzuki and Brian Mulligan’s avuncular Sharpless. Edward Gardner wrings less colour from the score than expected, but creates a number of searingly powerful climaxes.