Anna Picard

Manon Lescaut is twerking — should we applaud or shudder? 

How the Welsh National Opera's MTV version of Manon the minx made me wish for comfortable cotton underwear

Gwyn Hughes Jones as des Grieux with Chiara Taigi as Manon [Getty Images/Shutterstock/iStock/Alamy] 
issue 15 February 2014

Last seen clambering over the MDF wheelchair ramps of Laurent Pelly’s Royal Opera House production of Jules Massenet’s opéra comique, Manon the minx, the ‘sphinx étonnant’ of Abbé Prévost’s 1731 novel Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut, reappears in two guises as part of Welsh National Opera’s Fallen Women season; as the heroine of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut and the antiheroine of Hans Werner Henze’s Boulevard Solitude, both directed by Mariusz Trelinski.

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