One mystery of opera production, against the laws of arithmetic, is that addition can end up as subtraction. Glyndebourne festival’s new La bohème (1896) is full of ideas but they diminish a work already entire of itself. Staged by the director Floris Visser, coming on wings of promise from Dutch National Opera and elsewhere, it is Glyndebourne’s first new bohème for more than two decades. Visser sidesteps Puccini’s detailed stage directions and no one should object to that. A fresh approach is welcome if it convinces. So the familiar garret, Latin Quarter and city barrier are replaced by a fixed-set, high-walled cobbled street which recedes to a black horizon. Your imagination does the rest.
This oppressive linear space cramps the action, however, and results in a confused relationship between the key characters which never finds clarity. The only interruption to countless shades of grey (designs by Dieuweke van Reij and team, with effective lighting by Alex Brok) is some spot colour: sinister red balloons, Mimì’s pink beret, and a spray of lavish pink blossoms which miraculously grow out of a stack of chairs. Are they the false flowers Mimì the seamstress makes from fabric? An omnipresent figure in a long overcoat, yes Death himself (Christopher Lemmings), pulls a tarpaulin aside to reveal these flowers and you know this is a bad sign, if not a big symbol. If Puccini had needed Death in the cast list he surely would have created the character. Instead he managed, quite brilliantly, with a musical interplay of optimism and anguish, to stain it progressively into every note, bar, change of harmony or flicker of counterpoint, of the score.
