The Royal Opera’s Jette Parker Young Artists have opted for modernism for their first post-lockdown production, with a double bill of Stravinsky’s Mavra and Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, conducted by Michael Papadopoulos and directed by Anthony Almeida. It’s an unusual pairing. Stravinsky’s 1922 comedy, about a soldier cross-dressing in order to gain employment as a maid to his girlfriend’s mother, remains something of a rarity. Nowadays, meanwhile, we would usually expect to encounter Schoenberg’s moonstruck Pierrot in the concert hall rather than the theatre, though we should not forget that the work was originally a cabaret piece and later became a ballet, choreographed by Glen Tetley.
What links them, as Almeida’s staging makes clear, are ideas about gender and identity. Drag permits Vasily access to a world his masculinity denies him. Tradition, meanwhile, assigns the role of Pierrot to a woman, even though Schoenberg’s protagonist is male and the gender of the performer is undesignated in the score. Consequently what we first see, during the overture to Mavra, is Alexandra Lowe’s Pierrot discarding women’s clothes to become a Dietrich-like androgyne, while Egor Zhuravskii’s Vasily experiments with trying on Mavra’s wig. The problem is that Pierrot’s presence as a silent extra figure in the first few minutes of Mavra becomes seriously confusing.
