Thérèse (Elsa Benoit) and The Husband (Régis Mengus)
(Picture: Glyndebourne Productions Ltd. Photo: Bill Cooper)The eponymous appendages in Poulenc’s comic opera Les mamelles de Tirésias are deflated by their owner, Thérèse, on announcing she’s a feminist and wants to run the country – or go to war. She grows a moustache, leaving her function as a propagator of babies to be taken over by her husband, who demonstrates that anybody can do it, with a bit of ingenuity and willpower.
This somewhat unpromising scenario – and the exploding breasts are juvenile or hilarious according to taste – is introduced by the ironic announcement (or is it?) of the Theatre Manager, in a prologue, that the moral of the drama is that France must make more babies. President de Gaulle, the country’s new leader, said much the same thing in a speech immediately after the Second World War, urging the French people to produce “12 million beautiful babies in 10 years”.
