Play review: Roméo et Juliette

Roméo et Juliette at the Met: ‘This light is not daylight…’

Michael Yeargan’s permanent set is dominated by two wings of an imposing arcaded façade and loggia of a grand palace in dark stone, occupying the right-hand side of the picture (from the audience’s point of view) and extending about two-thirds of the way across parallel to the front of the stage, leaving an acting area of about 20 feet in depth with a rectangular wooden platform slightly off-centre. To the left is a vista up a gloomy street with a sharp turn towards an exit masked downstage by another solid and extensive façade. A column to the left, roughly level with the upstage edge of the wooden platform, partially obstructs the view up this side street, and its base provides an additional position for actors. Consequently, the Capulets’ feast takes place in a palazzo that is always open to the public and at the same time anticipates the tomb in which the lovers’ journey will end. This setting, and the unremittingly tenebrous lighting, offers no suggestion of sunlight and only minimal indication of daylight. Nothing corresponds to Gounod’s evocation of Juliet’s garden in the introduction to Act 2, and even when the platform is established as a marketplace with a few chorus members and appropriate props, the crepuscular gloom prevails. In 3.1, Friar Laurence arrives with the basic furnishings of a ‘chapel’ on a handcart, and these serve for the marriage scene, which is followed by the interval. The effect is that of an arrangement appropriate for an open stage in an intimate theatre, but which somehow has to be played in front of a massive and overpowering architectural set that gives no hint of Verona but rather suggests the banking district of a bleak northern city.

Bartlett Sher’s skill in handling crowds, honed in his experience with Broadway musicals as well as spoken theatre, shows itself in the solemn opening. The stage fills slowly with revellers dressed as if for a carnival in the style of Fellini’s Casanova – the acknowledged influence for Catherine Zuber’s costumes – who face the audience in silence before beginning the prologue in which Gounod challenges comparison with Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette. A mysterious masked beauty (Rosaline?) moves slowly across the stage, and actors dressed as commedia performers appear among the crowd. Having established the tragic dignity of the story, Gounod suddenly shifts with a mazurka into a mode more appropriate to the Second Empire than any imaginary Renaissance Verona, let alone the intoxicating Romantic world of Berlioz. Like ‘Je veux vivre’, the ariette in waltz time with which Juliette subsequently responds to the Nurse’s suggestion about marrying, this thoroughly enjoyable music conveys gaiety and insouciance but wrenches the opera out of its supposed historical time frame. There are a few moments, though, where Sher’s ingenuity in providing stage business to accompany the music produces an unfortunate effect, notably in Juliette’s ‘Je veux vivre’, where he provides the singer with a small audience of male admirers in addition to the Nurse to whom the ariette is in fact addressed. With the repeated ‘Ah’s directed to this onstage audience, the declarations of an innocently romantic wish to remain unmarried and perpetuate the ‘intoxicating dream’ of her springtime (‘Laisse mon âme à son printemps’) seem unduly flirtatious and knowing. Arguably, though, Diana Damrau’s Juliette is being playful rather than playing the field at this point, and very soon she marks the seriousness and depth of emotion that possess her once she has encountered the ardent Roméo of Vittorio Grigolo. Both seem appropriately surprised by passion.

In the final sequence of scenes, by use of the platform and a few properties, Sher achieves strikingly economical and powerful effects of the kind that have characterised his other work. A white sheet that has formed a canopy over the market place is lowered onto the wooden platform to serve as the lovers’ bed and, successively, both Juliet’s wedding garment and her winding sheet. After the sheet has been spread out, three women place on it the properties needed for the coming scene: a bowl with water and a cloth for Juliet’s post-nuptial ablutions, and a dagger that she will subsequently hide under the cloth. This moment of solemn ritual initiates the opera’s approach to the final scene in the tomb. Juliette appeals to Friar Laurence for help and is given the potion, which she drinks, and lies down, wrapping herself in the cloth. In the production’s continuous action, Capulet brings Paris to meet his bride, and she collapses. Her apparent demise is followed immediately by her four attendant women escorting her (walking slowly) to the tomb, on which she lies as a tall double door is flown in upstage for Roméo to make his entrance. In the final moments of the opera, Roméo, having realised that the poison is taking effect, admits what he has done:

Sher has Juliet take Roméo’s dagger from his boot – her own having been taken from the ‘bed’ by the Nurse – and places it in his hand before thrusting it into herself. An explicitly sexual gesture having thus been imported into Gounod’s religiose and sentimental finale, the lovers raise themselves for a final effort to utter repentance for the mortal sin they have just committed: ‘Seigneur, Seigneur, pardonnez-nous !’

What did Gounod and his collaborators bring to Romeo and Juliet, and what did they take away? On the credit side, much of the music is tuneful and sophisticated, and ample challenges are afforded for star singers. The invented role of young Stephano exists mainly to precipitate the fatal sword fight, and of course to provide a number for a favourite exponent of trouser roles. He is given a charming chanson at the opening of 3.2 (the street outside Capulet’s house in the libretto), warning the turtle doves about the proximity of the vultures. (‘Que fais-tu, blanche tourtourelle / Dans ce nid de vautours?’) In the first scene of their third act, Gounod and his librettists, Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, have provided a marriage scene of faultless piety. The lovers get four duets, including the terminal one in the tomb. As for what is taken away, most of the humour is missing. Any bawdy talk has been removed, along with almost all the dialogue for Mercutio and the Nurse, but Capulet has his moments, urging his guests to annoy those who disapprove of youthful gaiety: ‘Nargue, nargue des censeurs / Qui grondent sans cesse’. The action of the final acts is compressed into a rapid journey towards the tomb. In giving her the potion, the Friar has simply told Juliette that he and her husband will be there when she wakes up. There is no detour to Mantua and no visit to the Apothecary: Roméo has simply procured poison somewhere by the time he arrives in the Capulet vault.

Adrian Noble and Verdi’s Macbeth

Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette has very little interesting to say about the play, which merely provides the pretext for a sophisticated and sentimental entertainment. I find it hard to resist Winton Dean’s assessment that it is ‘as remote in spirit from Shakespeare as his Faust is from Goethe’ and that he ‘attires both stories in the same voluptuous and sugary envelope’ (Dean 151). By contrast, in all his dealings with Shakespeare – in Macbeth, Otello, and Falstaff – Verdi’s analysis of the plays is far more searching and subtle. In a prose synopsis sent to his librettist, Francesco Maria Piave, Verdi identified the elements of Macbeth he wished to address. Julian Budden summarises them as follows:

the witches’ prophecy […] and its fulfilment; Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy on receiving her husband’s letter; the ‘dagger’ speech; the murder of Duncan and its discovery; Banquo’s murder and his apparition at the feast; Macbeth’s second visit to the witches and the show of kings; the meeting of Malcolm and Macduff on the English border; Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene; and, finally, Macbeth’s demise at the hands of Macduff. (Budden 196–7)

Noble’s production is appropriately dark. The acting area is used to great advantage by Mark Thompson’s basic set, which consists of a platform sloping towards the front, with tall trees in the background against a lowering sky. For the interior of the castle, pillars are flown in to the centre of the stage, framing the bed on which Duncan will be murdered. Some larger foreground tree trunks are pulled off to the side, allowing for swift transitions to an open stage. Chandeliers are dropped in for the banquet scene, and much use is made here and subsequently of silver-painted wooden chairs. Costuming evokes a period immediately after the Second World War, with suggestions of more recent conflicts in the Balkan countries. With their drab battle fatigues, leather blousons and ad hoc assortment of firearms, both armies (and the murderers of Banquo) seem more like partisans than regular troops. Although Duncan and his briefly seen ministerial entourage are smartly dressed, the fight for power evidently takes place in an unstable and brutal world.

The act-drop first rises to reveal a massed chorus of Witches (Verdi specifies at least three groups of six) in drab street clothes, with hats and handbags and accompanied by three female children. As the music suggests, they clearly enjoy their rituals, and this meeting will be a special one. Their heavy shoes beat out a rhythm on the stage floor and in their handbags are lights that they shine upwards onto their faces. To welcome Macbeth (Željko Lučić), three who have been dancing wildly come down to the front centre and lie down provocatively, legs apart, while others gather round Banquo. This quasi-sexual seduction of the hero will be followed up in the subsequent encounter with the witches and corresponds to the emphasis on the erotic element in his relationship with his wife. The difference between the reactions of the two soldiers to the news that Cawdor has been executed is emphasised by their being on opposite sides of stage in the duet that begins with Macbeth’s ‘Ah! L’inferno il ver parlò!’ In one of the many simple but expressive touches in Noble’s direction, Banquo at first hangs back when they exit, reluctant to follow Macbeth’s lead.

In the ‘apparitions’ scene, which opens Verdi’s third act and the production’s second, the witches come into the space – previously established as the banqueting hall – where a row of chairs remains, and lay an ordinary table cloth on the floor. Some ingredients for the potion Macbeth will drink have been baked into a cake, and there is a large jug of some kind of beverage. Three little girls eat and drink in a parody of the communion, and are then made to vomit into a chalice. During the mixing, the massed group of witches swing their open handbags to and fro under their chins in time to the lilting chorus with lyrics adapted from Middleton’s The Witch (‘E voi spiriti / Negri e candidi / Rossi e ceruli / Rimiscete. Rimiscete’). When Macbeth enters, his attitude is at first slightly casual and sardonic: ‘Che fate, misteriose donne?’ is after all more polite than Shakespeare’s ‘How now you secret, black and midnight hags’. But he is disturbed by the reply that this is ‘a deed without a name’ (‘Un’ opera senza nome’). He drinks as prompted by the three witches who have officiated in the rite: the same three (dancers, mute) who lay before him in the first scene. A light from the chalice illuminates his face as he raises it to his lips. The witches gather upstage on the right as a trap opens and a large translucent sphere emerges. The faces of the first three apparitions appear within this, larger than life size, and after it descends, the line of kings is represented by figures descending from above in livid green light. As they disappear, Banquo enters in his bloody shirt (as he has appeared in the banquet scene), holding a shard of mirror, and walks calmly across the stage in front of Macbeth. Lady Macbeth (Anna Netrebko) enters and learns of the plan to murder Macduff and his family, and in the duet that ends the scene (‘Ora di morte di vendetta’), she drags Macbeth on top of her with an orgasmic exclamation of ‘Vendetta!’

This follows through on the production’s consistent emphasis on the couple’s erotic relationship, and also corresponds to her response to Macbeth’s letter. When this is brought to her as she lies in bed in the second scene of the first act, she seems to wake from a dream. After reading it, she launches into the ecstatic and determined ‘Hie thee hither’ (‘Veni! T’affreta!’), and at the news of Duncan’s impending arrival, in her second solo, ‘Duncano sarà qui?’, she lies on stage as if surrendering herself to the demons she invokes (‘Or tutti sorgete / Ministri infernali’). In the sleepwalking scene, she appears again in a dream-like state, now with her dress stained and hair dishevelled, and the witches place chairs for her to step onto as she moves towards the front of the stage and, at the end of the scene, for her exit: the spirits and their helpers do not forsake her. An industrial-standard lamp – one of three – is lowered to the centre in front of the prompter’s box, and after she has ‘washed’ her hands, she rises and sends it swinging. (It has been used to similar effect in the ‘dagger’ soliloquy.) When Macbeth learns of his wife’s death, he is sitting on one of the silver chairs, clutching his crown: this has been a throne-free production, and the crown is the only symbol of kingship. The chairs, whether placed across the stage for the banquet or scattered in the confusion as Macbeth’s castle is invaded, are examples of the kind of symbolic props that have characterised Noble’s best theatre work. Snow is falling as the ‘England scene’ begins, and a solitary soldier sits on a jeep, smoking a cigarette. The crowd of refugees, with bundles and bags and including a number of children, enter gradually and huddle along the front of the platform as Macduff receives his letter. ‘Patria oppressa’, Verdi’s great lament for a broken country, is allowed the physical space it needs, just as the composer gives it the necessary time in an otherwise artfully compressed narrative. Noble’s evocation of contemporary conflicts is direct and unfussy, like other touches that support the powerful focus and intensity of an opera in which the source play has been expertly analysed and honed.

Two visits to Windsor

Arrigo Boito wrote to Verdi that his aim as librettist for Falstaff was to ‘squeeze all the juice from that Shakespearean orange without letting any of the useless pips fall into the glass. […] It is very difficult and must seem very easy’ (Budden 300). Among the ‘useless pips’ were Nym, Parson Evans (and the Latin lesson and duel), John Rugby, and Slender. There is no Master Page, and no second visit of Falstaff to Ford’s house. Dr Caius, no longer identified as a Frenchman, opens the opera with his complaints that he has been robbed by Falstaff’s sidekicks, Bardolfo and Pistola, but otherwise is kept on hand only as Ford’s favoured bridegroom for his daughter Nanetta, and to fill out ensembles and play his part in the final scene. Fenton is not identified as being connected with the court. Boito raids the two parts of Henry IV to enrich Falstaff’s role, the most notable additions being the speech on honour, which figures in his rebuke to his henchmen when they refuse to carry his letters to the two wives, and the praise of the wine that is brought to him after his ducking in the Thames. After the discovery and discomfiture of Falstaff, Ford immediately sees the joke and agrees with good grace to join in the masquerade at Herne’s Oak. He still plans to have his daughter marry Caius. As in the play, with Quickly’s help he is thwarted in this by the substitution of the disguised Bardolfo as Caius’s ‘bride’. The result is a tightly plotted comedy in six scenes, and the love interest is skilfully interwoven with the fast-paced intrigue. In the protracted final scene, Verdi stakes his claim to the lyrical ‘fairy’ world of Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the opera ends with Falstaff, who is to give a dinner party for everyone, insisting that they should end the scene with a chorus (‘Un coro e terminiam la scena’), and leading an intricate fugue, ‘Tutto nel mundo è burla’ – everything in the world is a jest. The whole episode, in other words, has illustrated the heroically comedic principle by which he lives, the cause of wit in others as well as a triumphant symbol of satisfied appetites, despite, of course, having been bested in his quest for sexual gratification.

Within this framework, in which nothing is extraneous, Verdi provides ample opportunity for his singers, supporting them with a tightly composed and varied score in which recurrent motifs are interwoven. It is, quite simply, full of lyrical surprises. The vocal music ranges from the complexity of the final fugue, to the intensity of Ford’s barely comic declaration of jealousy, the quartets in the second scene for the wives, Quickly and Nanetta and Ford, Caius, Bardolfo and Pistola, and encompasses sudden incidental felicities as Falstaff’s remarkable miniature ‘Quand’ero paggio / Del Duca di Norfolk’ (barely a minute in duration). Verdi litters the score with such witty touches as the expression of delighted nostalgia with which Falstaff lovingly singles out an anchovy – ‘Un’acciuga’ – as he reads the bill presented by the Host of the Garter in the first scene. The score is both lyrical and, on occasion, heroic (Falstaff’s stomach is amply celebrated), and it has a beguiling lightness of touch.

Of the two productions, that directed by Richard Jones at Glyndebourne, with Christopher Purves as Falstaff, is nimbler, with a surer sense than Carsen’s of its setting in England in the immediate post-war period. The drop curtain is a giant cross-stitch view of Windsor Castle, on which three little girls in Brownie uniforms are still working as the audience settles down. Quickly is still wearing her army (ATS) uniform, and we see members of a rowing club, a small group of Eton College schoolboys, and male and female drinkers in suitably drab suits and hats in the first scene. In this version of Windsor, the Garter is a comfortable pub, where Falstaff enjoys privileges that include the provision of a liberal supply of bottles and a table and typewriter for him to prepare his (literally carbon-copied) letters to the two wives, and where a ginger cat is curled up on the bar. The wives plot in the back garden of Ford’s house, where in a strategy appropriate to the times all the terraces are planted with cabbages, and the defenestration of Falstaff takes place from the bay window of a comfortable, chintz-decorated middle-class drawing room. (In the final scene, it seems that the curtains have been used to make costumes for Meg and Alice.) The first scene of the final act begins in the street outside the Garter, evidently a Thames-side establishment, as Falstaff is pulled out of the river offstage (spurting water when he is laid down on the pavement) and at one point, a swan floats majestically across the front of the stage. On one side of the entrance is a shop selling bridal gowns, on the other a ‘Joke Shop’, providing between them the fancy-dress disguises for the final scene. The numbers convening to taunt Falstaff at Herne’s Oak are sufficient to suggest collaboration by a small community, and in the final chorus, the hostess of the Garter, assisted by the Brownies, distributes glasses of beer to them – not forgetting one for the conductor, Vladimir Jurowski, who pauses the number while, to the audience’s delight, he downs his glass in one.

This intimacy, with a touch of parody but rooted in the realities of the place and period, contrasts with the outsize scenic resources and consequent sense of exaggeration in the Met’s production, in which both Falstaff’s bedroom – littered with the room-service trolleys that have served a gargantuan appetite – and the kitchen of Ford’s house extend some 60 feet across the stage. The Garter, here more of a hotel, has a dining room and lounge of similar proportions and employs a team of waiters and a uniformed bellboy. (In the Glyndebourne version, he is a chubby and bespectacled boy who is probably the son of the inn’s proprietors.) The opera’s second scene, in which the plotting takes place, is set in the dining room, with the women at a table on the left and other diners in the background. When the men arrive, they occupy a table at the right, but both groups need to come down to front and centre for their ensemble numbers, and when the women laugh, they turn towards the audience as if solliciting its complicity. Both groups have to leave the stage so that Anne and Fenton (a waiter) can have their exchanges, while the background action freezes and the lighting changes. In the next scene, when Ford and his helpers – about 15 of them – ransack the kitchen searching for Falstaff, they fling out the contents of the fitted cupboards, and in the final scene, which turns into a hunt ball when the tormentors throw off their cloaks and masks, there seems to be a full complement of the Met chorus. (Even in the 1950s, I’m not sure the upwardly mobile Fords would have been invited to this kind of ‘county’ occasion.) All this serves to fill the stage in a production shared with other grand opera houses (including Covent Garden), but the physical staging lacks the sense of intimacy and warmth evoked by the music. This quality has to be provided by Verdi and, of course, the singers.

Without exception, the singing and acting are excellent in both productions, but for present purposes, it seems appropriate to take the two fat knights as representatives of their respective versions of Windsor. At the Met, Ambrogio Maestri is a wonderfully genial Falstaff, but the squalor in which he is first discovered, in bed in stained grey underwear, with his decidedly louche companions desperately in need of an Alka-Seltzer, suggests that he is genially self-deluding in his claims to be irresistible to women. At Glyndebourne, Christopher Purves has the debonair neatness and grace of a credible (if overweight) ladies’ man, a combination of Sydney Greenstreet’s Gutman in The Maltese Falcon and the adroitly buoyant Oliver Hardy. He is able to use his belly to drive all before him, but at the same time has the lightness of foot characteristic of the opera as a whole. If any conclusion can be drawn from the comparison of these two productions, I would suggest that at the Met, the dramatic qualities of the work of Verdi and Boito survive the staging, whereas in Glyndebourne’s production, they are fully embodied. Jones’s direction and Ultz’s designs also capture the quality identified in Russ McDonald’s essay accompanying the DVD, ‘the ambiguity of all great comedy: that indefinable mixture of optimism and tristesse’ (McDonald 9).

Tristesse and (somewhat qualified) optimism would seem to sum up the initial sensation of seeing these operas at home in March and April 2020. With a number of planned theatre visits suddenly cancelled and little prospect of a rapid return to the broader ‘normality’, recorded theatre of any kind had an emotional impact like that generated by films and television programmes in which we saw daily life as we had taken it for granted: crowded streets and shops, drinks and meals with friends. And meanwhile, more serious matters of life and death were being coped with. These streamed performances from the archives were not merely a means of escape. They were also reminders of the potential of the theatre and music, not merely as a consolation but as a source of strength, and a reminder of what has been and will be possible.