‘We’ll part when the flowers appear,” sing Mimì and Rodolfo at the end of act three, putting off the break-up they have now accepted as inevitable. There’s nothing in Puccini’s music to dampen the audience’s fond hope that they’ll work things out in the meantime and live happily ever after. But in Floris Visser’s new La Bohème, there is a chill to these words – because the flowers are already appearing, sickly pink against the monochrome set, uncovered by the tall, gaunt figure who has been shadowing consumptive Mimì since before she stepped into Rodolfo’s life.
Death is not in Puccini’s cast list. But in Visser’s production, which plays on any number of film references from The Seventh Seal to Meet Joe Black, he is on stage so much that it’s almost a surprise that he doesn’t get the final curtain call. Can the others see him? Mimì can, once she accepts her illness; Rodolfo can’t, yet he glances over his shoulder as if he senses something is there. The opera becomes something other than – arguably more than – a story of youth and doomed love. And Visser’s gamble pays off: it is riveting.
