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Reflexive and reflective

Michael Tanner

Wednesday, 26th March 2008

Punch and Judy
Linbury Studio

La vie parisienne
Guildhall School of Music and Drama

A couple of evenings previously I went to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, a smirk of premonitory pleasure on my face, to see Offenbach’s La vie parisienne. If ever a title should have been translated, it was this one: the show was as English as Offenbach is French. Often I wish there were more of this wonderful composer on offer in this country, apart from lumbering Hoffmann, but when there is it always sinks into self-congratulatory punning and naughtiness, decked out, as here, in a variety of accents, some of them bogus and some genuine, none faintly funny. The director Martin Lloyd-Evans had indulged himself in writing the dialogue, which constituted about three fifths of the evening; one wonders who agreed with him that it was amusing. Onstage we had a team, all of whom are on the opera course, but who seemed, from their lack of vocal distinction, to be primarily bad actors rather than bad singers. Clive Timms as usual conducted with flair, and the orchestral contributions were the only source of pleasure — but there are so few of them. Foolishly I had listened to some of my beloved recording with Régine Crespin, which sets a standard of sophisticated vitality at the opposite extreme from anything the GSMD was prepared or able to offer on this tiresome occasion. I don’t even ask that performers of Offenbach (or Johann Strauss) study the French (or Germans), only that they see how human beings behave, for they are what this master is satirising, not a dimwitted species which, whatever the failings of the evolutionary process, isn’t to be counted among them.