Puccini’s La Bohème is the opera in which the hero and heroine, Rodolfo and Mimì, share their first intimate moments on the floor of a dark garret, supposedly looking for Mimì’s key (Rodolfo has already pocketed it), her candle having gone out.
The problem of playing this scene at Opera Holland Park, where the stage is flooded with daylight until the interval, is neatly obviated in Natascha Metherell’s production (designer Madeleine Boyd, lighting Charlie Morgan Jones), by setting the action on an artificially lit film set.
Rodolfo becomes an aspiring scriptwriter, his student friends Marcello (Ross Ramgobin), Schaunard (Harry Thatcher) and Colline (Barnaby Rea), all admirably sung, respectively a scenic designer, budding composer and cinematographer. Mimì is a wardrobe girl.
It all provides a fresh take on a perennial favourite, further justified by the element of artifice that runs through the work. Mimì and Rodolfo groping in the dark are largely playacting, while Musetta’s seduction song in Act II (alluringly sung by Elizabeth Karani) is inherently a performative gesture. The students too (at least in Mürger’s original stories) are merely masquerading as impoverished bohemians.
Before the action starts, a recording of Edith Piaf singing La Foule establishes the atmosphere of the Latin Quarter in the 1950s. Piaf may have had none, but regrets are integral to Bohème and no one demonstrated this more clearly than George Jackson on the podium, conducting the fine City of London Sinfonia.
Not only did he pace the action unfailingly to contrast the moments of private anguish with the frenetic public activity going on around it, but he also drew out the beauty and wrung the maximum pathos from a score that drips with it.
My only regret was that Metherell keeps all the action on the top level of the stage, furthest from the audience, inexplicably making virtually no use of the curved stage in front of the orchestra. The children provided by the Pimlico Musical Foundation and the Tiffin Choirs could have disported themselves all the more gaily in front of our noses, while the intimate scenes for Rodolfo and Mimì would have had even greater impact.
As it is, Rodolfo and Mimì say their addios from opposite ends of a huge, remote stage. Rodolfo comes round to the front to sing a few bars but then retires to the back again. Worse still, the bickering couple Musetta and Marcello come to the front to exchange their insults, leaving the impassioned Rodolfo and Mimì trying to make themselves heard at the rear.
The deathbed scene is expertly handled, however, not least by Jackson. Long before this, Katie Bird had been singing with lustrous tone as Mimì (a fabulous top C to close Act I), while Adam Gilbert had gained increasing confidence as an emotionally tormented Rodolfo.
As Mimì breathed her last, extras from the film set stand silently at the sides, suggesting it is not just us the audience witnessing the tragedy of the main protagonists: the whole community is sharing their grief.
