Good humour, bad taste

L’Elisir d’amore; Das Wunder del Heliane

After not seeing Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’amore for years, I went to two new productions of it in five days. The Glyndebourne one, which I reported on last week, is admirable, but the Royal Opera production is in some ways better still. That surprised me, because the director is Laurent Pelly, who also designs the costumes, with Donate Marchand, and the sets are by Chantal Thomas. That was the team responsible for La fille du régiment, the enormous success at the beginning of the year which I found so irritating, though almost everyone else left holding their ribs from an evening of unmitigated hilarity. In that production everything was in quotation marks, with a goofy chorus and incessant parody of all the elements of Italian 19th-century comic opera. In L’Elisir that is avoided, though it is sometimes implied. As with the new Glyndebourne production, the action is updated to the mid-20th century, but that isn’t overstressed. It does enable the director to have ‘Doctor’ Dulcamara driving his lorry on to the stage, which as always is the cue for almost limitless mirth from a Covent Garden audience — no one could accuse them of being blasé and over-sophisticated; though the gales of laughter that prompted were as nothing to those greeting the Jack Russell terrier that sprints across the stage at one point, and is to be seen again later, though its second appearance elicited affectionate grunts.

The most striking feature of the sets is the mountain of hay that we see when the curtain rises, and which is scrambled over fearlessly by the cast. The atmosphere of backwoods Italy sixty-something years ago is very well caught, and it doesn’t jar with the action.