Glyndebourne Touring Opera
Pelleas et Melisande
Apollo Theatre Friday 12th November

In brief, this was probably one of the best operas I have ever seen. The extraordinary design and painstaking direction intensified the fantasy of Debussy’s only opera, producing, not only a work of art, but the most surreal theatrical experience this side of the Theatre de Complicite.
Pelleas et Melisande is not the most straightforward of stories to start with: each scene appears almost entirely disconnected from the others, like a series of dreams all involving the same characters. The story is like a bizarre combination of The Magic Flute and Tristan und Isolde: the prince Golaud finds a mysterious girl crying by a fountain in a forest and marries her without being able to discover anything about her beyond her name, Melisande. He takes her back to the castle of his mother and grandfather, where she appears to fall in love with his half-brother Pelleas. The rest of the story, one that ends fatally for most of the participants, is devoted to their affair and Golaud’s jealousy, but it is told with extraordinary subtlety and beauty, through a series of strange and unresolved little scenes.
The set, first of all, is incredible. The floor of the stage is a sea of red and yellow flowers beneath a perspex covering, creating the illusion that the singers are moving around on the surface of a fairytale lake of drowned roses. On top of this the designer Paul Brown has set up the rugs and furnishings of a 1900 drawing room, with a few strange distortions that you might find in a dream - a china vase is 10 feet tall, the lamp hanging from the ceiling is large enough for Melisande to sit in. The players, triumphantly bucking the tradition of opera-singers as overweight marionettes, create impressions of bedrooms, gardens and caves out of chairs and thin air. The characterisation of the performers was also impressive, especially the terrifying childlike passivity of Mary-Louise Aitken’s Melisande.
All of which is combined with Debussy’s music and the sort of voices and orchestra one would expect from GTO. This is a performance of extraordinary imagination, which, unlike most imaginitive performances, respects and elevates the original work rather than twisting it into an unnatural form. 100 years after the premiere, you can’t help feeling that Debussy would be proud.

Miranda Rose