thu 28/03/2024

La Fille Du Régiment, Royal Opera | reviews, news & interviews

La Fille Du Régiment, Royal Opera

La Fille Du Régiment, Royal Opera

Kill to get a ticket for an unsurpassably entertaining Donizetti staging

You can take the girl out of the barracks but you can’t take the barracks out of the girl would be one way to sum up Donizetti’s La Fille du régiment (Daughter of the Regiment), which I can’t conceive could have a more ribtickling production, more brilliantly sung, than the delight that opened last night at Covent Garden. Kill, as they say, to get a ticket. It has Natalie Dessay, Juan Diego Flórez, Ann Murray and Dawn French, and in a starring supporting role comes one of the wittiest set of translating surtitles I’ve ever come across. “It’s raining soldiers,” complains the butler as the aristocratic kidnap of regimental mascot Marie goes wrong. “They’re my daddies,” she shouts happily.

The story is madly Gilbert-and-Sullivanesque, with an orphan girl who has been brought up by 1,500 soldiers, all of whom are simultaneously her “daddies” and yet also hoping she’ll marry one of them. There is naturally a war going on, between these French soldiers and the Tyrolean villagers, one of whom is in love with Marie and is prepared to be arrested, change allegiance, and even join the enemy army in order to be near her. Meanwhile a Marquise claims Marie as her own flesh and blood and tries to civilise her, so as to marry her off by proxy to an even snobbier Duchess’s son, who is absent on “obligations Olympiques”. All of this is treated with the surreal absurdity it richly deserves in Laurent Pelly’s staging, with mountains made of huge crumpled maps of the Tyrol, a soldiers’ camp that is drowning in laundry (Marie’s job), and a castle salon full of very rickety and almost dead old people. Wonderfully wacky scenery by Chantal Thomas.

01_DESSAY_CORBELLI_BCOOPERBut none of it would work if it were not all swirling around the unique talents of Dessay, who as well as owning an unsurpassably bright set of coloratura pipes, is also a stupendous physical clown, tiny, feisty, fearless. Her cue is Sergeant Sulpice drooling, "Here she is - isn't she bloody lovely?" and on shuffles a mountain of dirty sheets on two stalky legs. Half Eliza Doolittle, half Olive Oyl, Dessay in her dungarees is an oikish, stroppy delight, pinging out top Ds and Es while variously tumbling on the ground, skipping, riding piggyback, hopping off and on stools, or being held bodily high in the air horizontally by her regiment. (Right: Dessay and Corbelli as Sulpice, pictured by Bill Cooper)

The exertions puffed her a bit last night (she actually croaked at one point), but surely it’s only for Dessay’s daredevilry and unflagging energy that Pelly could have conceived such a sparklingly physical production, full of almost cartoon choreography and direction. Premiered in 2007, this is the first revival of what isn’t likely to be many (unless there’s another Dessay out there). It reunites her with Flórez, two monarchs of the high Cs with Es, and two performers of irresistible charm and complicity. And when there is also round-bellied, mutton-chopped Alessandro Corbelli as Sergeant Sulpice, and the haughty, willowy, silly Marquise de Berkenfeld (who is actually Marie’s mother, had her on a battlefield in Geneva, and left her quickly so no one would notice) is Ann Murray, one can’t get shinier comedy gold. Bruno Campanella conducts a nicely edited Royal Opera Orchestra with springy joie-de-vivre and clean, rustic textures so that every moment of comedy and every word can be clear, and we don’t lose the realisation in the music that our heroes are outdoorsy ordinary folks, not poncey drawing-room aristos.

There were wars raging in Paris when Donizetti wrote Fille in 1840 - opera wars between the Italian sparklers, himself, Rossini, Bellini, and the more serious-minded French cohorts led by Berlioz. Fille feels like the smugly dazzling invention of a man who knew he was everybody’s favourite, with its vocal fireworks for the heroine and two unforgettable arias for the tenor - famously “Ah, mes amis!” with its vertical leaps to nine top Cs - as well as a provocative opening scene of Tyrolean villagers huddling in fear of the villainous French army. Donizetti can be dull in long stretches of his serious operas, but he is bubbling over in this one, thumbing his nose at Paris salons with his dessicated little minuet at the start of Act Two, letting both hero and heroine have each one truly touching, sincerely loving aria so that we shall feel with them as well as laugh with them, and capping the lot with a giggly, mercurial buddy trio for Marie, Tonio and Sergeant Sulpice,“Tous les trois réunis”.

02_DESSAY_FLOREZ_BCOOPERFlórez, with his high sweet voice and slender, graceful carriage, dressed in ridiculous brown breeches, is so lovable that one can totally forgive Tonio his opportune desertion of his flag to join the other side - though by the end it all hardly matters, as all the political sides seem to have been obliterated in the social satire. What a singer he is, and what a deliciously doltish foil he is to the snarky, gamine Dessay, who thrashes her laundry with her iron in time with her coloratura, screeching and caterwauling like a banshee when inclined. But when the two of them synchronise their runs in the duet “Quoi? Vous m’aimez!”, it is the vocal equivalent of Olympic bobsleigh. (Left: Florez and Dessay, pictured by Bill Cooper)

Pelly delivers lots of jokes in the copious amount of speech through some deft switches in language, which makes the Franglais accents on stage even funnier. Agathe Mélinand’s slyly modernised dialogue is amusingly mangled by Dawn French in her speaking role as the magnificently hatted Duchesse de Crackentorp (Marie’s potential mother-in-law) at the end, and the entire evening has the sophistication and entertaining taste of a masterchef. M Pelly deserves the final bow.

Comments

most wonderful evening - Florez is superb

Add comment

newsletter

Get a weekly digest of our critical highlights in your inbox each Thursday!

Simply enter your email address in the box below

View previous newsletters