Madama Butterfly
Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin
★★★★☆
The brief, bustling overture to Puccini’s 1904 Madama Butterfly dissolves into the middle of a throwaway conversation about traditional Japanese homes and their suspended and sliding partitions. For Irish National Opera’s coproduction with Scottish Opera, the designer Kat Heath blows up this inconsequential reference for a set comprised of enormous movable panels that serve the opera from start to finish.
Their sheer size is arresting and imposing, fully accommodated on the large stage of the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, and their capacity for lateral and horizontal movement yields both intimate spaces and deep, exaggerated ones. They are neutral in colour, lending themselves to expressions of mood or time of day via Jake Wiltshire’s lighting designs.
Somehow they are not distracting and allow for surprises and for either revealing characters or suddenly removing them from view. And sometimes they create the illusion of watching through a camera lens, zooming in, zooming out.
This effect contributes to a cinematic leavening throughout, something the production’s director, Daisy Evans, uses for emotional immediacy. Notably, she almost sets aside the callous, exploitative behaviour of the American naval officer Pinkerton, who, while on shore leave in Nagasaki, marries the unsuspecting local girl Cio-Cio-San with no intention of returning once he rejoins his ship, leaving her pregnant.
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Instead Evans shifts focus away from the man and woman and towards mother and child. She raises the curtain on an imagined scene in the future: the funeral of Pinkerton, attended by his now adult son and Kate, his now elderly American wife. This is decades beyond the end of the opera and is staged in silence before the overture.
Evans inserts the adult son, played mute by the actor Michael Mullen, so that it is through his eyes and near-continuous presence – possibly a little too continuous for some, just about workable for me – that we are invited to consider her view of Cio-Cio-San as “no victim” but “a young woman of fierce pride, honesty and unshakeable love”.
This is a Cio-Cio-San perfectly fitted to the soprano Celine Byrne. Alongside her star quality and vocal beauty in some of Puccini’s most-loved music, Byrne presents her character as assured and forward-thinking rather than naive and vulnerable.
The firm-voiced tenor Otar Jorjikia also matches Evans’s charitable vision: swaggerless, less openly despicable and cynical than usual. This reduces the foil element of the role of Consul Sharpless, although the baritone Iurii Samoilov still sings the part with persuasive though restrained compassion – something also projected by the mezzo-soprano Hyona Kim as the servant Suzuki.
The mezzo Imelda Drumm doubles up as both young and elderly Kate Pinkerton, somewhat disrupting the symmetry established for the son but delivering the guilt and troubled remorse proposed by Evans rather than Kate’s customary coolness.
The large chorus makes a strong impact in their sole scene, renouncing Cio-Cio-San at her wedding, and Irish National Opera’s artistic director, Fergus Sheil, conducts Puccini’s moving score with a warm, gentle energy. A special mention for young Ewan Gaster, who energetically plays the child, notably in playful interactions with his future self.
Madama Butterfly is at Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin, on Tuesday, November 4th, Thursday, November 6th, and Saturday, November 8th
