Skip to main content

La Boheme

Scottish Opera, Glasgow

Four stars

Universal Basic Income probably wasn’t on Puccini’s mind back in the 1890s when he penned his backstreet tragedy of love and death amongst the starving artist set. How to make a living in the latter-day creative industries is nevertheless one of the many of-the-moment concerns in Scottish Opera’s ingenious new production, the company’s first for six months. 

 

Using Jonathan Dove’s arrangement and a scaled down orchestra, director Roxana Haines reimagines the story for the Covid-19 created socially distanced age. Performed outdoors in what is normally the company’s car park, Haines’ new take sets the story among freelancers trying to get a break as they’re starved of work.

 

Chances are that writer Rodolfo, painter Marcello, busker Schaunard and thinker in residence Colline can beg, steal or borrow their way through things. For Elizabeth Llewellyn’s costume designer, Mimi, alas, it looks fatal. If only she’d got herself a sugar daddy like Marcello’s glamour chasing ex, Musetta, it might have been a different story. As Rodolfo declaims in Amanda Holden’s playful English translation, however, “The end of the world is upon us.”

 

The action is played out on the backs of trucks that form two of the three stages before a socially distanced audience sat at cabaret tables. Anna Orton’s site-specific design gives what follows the air of the sort of junkyard happening Puccini’s characters would undoubtedly hang out at. The accompanying splashes of graffiti designs by artpistol Projects that adorn the set reinforce such an image. 

 

This gives an extra edge to the performances, led by Samuel Sakker as Rodolfo and a fabulous Llewellyn as Mimì, who, like Rhian Lois as Musetta, is making her Scottish Opera debut. Roland Wood’s Marcello leads the rest of the gang, aided by Arthur Bruce and David Ireland as Schaunard and Colline, while Francis Church’s Alcindoro foots the bill.

 

With performers keeping their distance, movement director Jessica Rhodes’ choreographed appearance expresses the sort of physicality currently not possible between consenting adults. The result is a production that lays bare the emotional heart of society in crisis.


The Herald, September 7th 2020

 

ends

 

 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) 1. THE STONE ROSES    Don’t Stop ( Silvertone   ORE   1989) The trip didn’t quite start here for what sounds like Waterfall played backwards on The Stone Roses’ era-defining eponymous debut album, but it sounds
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug
2 comments
Read more

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h
Post a Comment
Read more