A gleaming new station on the Paris Metro. A dishevelled figure sleeps on a plastic bench, and a girl in a trenchcoat and stilettos studies an illuminated network map. That’s how director Mariusz Treli?ski sees the opening of Manon Lescaut, in WNO’s new production, and that’s pretty much how he sees the whole show. It’s an aggressively modern urban landscape of alienation, and all the traditional clichés are firmly in place: stylised sexual violence, lovers who pace slowly around each other with blank expressions, and a love duet sung down a payphone.
Did it work? The opening crowd scenes were stunningly choreographed, even if the direction lost focus in Act 2: Boris Kudli?ka’s brilliant, dark set served throughout. And at times the fusion of Puccini’s rapturous score (splashily conducted by Lothar Koenigs) with flickering video images of city lights achieved a powerful, poignant beauty. The neon frame that lit up around Manon (Chiara Taigi, singing as well as acting with a piercing, steely intensity), as Des Grieux (Gwyn Hughes Jones: on fabulous, soaring voice) saw her for the first time was a moment of pure theatrical magic.
The programme referenced David Lynch, and Geronte (Stephen Richardson) carried a Dennis Hopper oxygen mask; Lescaut (David Kempster, playing fabulously sleazily against type) was a hipster-thug. Treli?ski played Act 4 as an endlessly repeating dream-fugue, the characters trapped inside a nightmare of their own making. On its own terms, that was highly effective.
And yet – writing as someone who went to see Mulholland Drive four times – there was one unchanging factor in this opera which simply refused to fit that vision: Puccini’s music, insisting on compassion where Treli?ski presented brutality, on warmth where Treli?ski saw coldness and on limitless emotional colours where Treli?ski gave us hard-edged blacks and whites. Sorry about that.
