Alexandra Coghlan

More sex, please

Plus: Ivo van Hove peels away the skin rather than the clothes in Janacek’s Diary of One Who Disappeared

Where was the desire, the frisson, the flicker of attraction? Hell, where was the sex? I ask because a week spent at the seedier end of the romance spectrum has left me feeling profoundly unsatisfied. Two classic femmes fatales — Puccini’s convent-girl manqué Manon Lescaut and Janacek’s dark-eyed gypsy Zefka — had their chance to beguile and blew it. There was disquiet, revulsion, confusion and a certain amount of modish awkwardness, but the itchy urgency of it all was absent — the emotional ignition without which neither Manon Lescaut nor The Diary of One Who Disappeared can find their flame.

A chilly night launched Opera Holland Park’s 2019 season, and there wasn’t much more heat coming from the stage. Puccini’s first operatic success isn’t the easy, affable tragedy we get from La bohème or Madame Butterfly. There are rougher edges to both an opera and a heroine that are still under construction, works in progress. In the original novel, Abbé Prévost’s Manon is a brittle teenager, all greedy eyes and sharp elbows. Clothed in Puccini’s ravishing score she softens into dangerous pathos — a trick you know is coming, but whose sleight of hand always catches your breath.

Director Karolina Sofulak relocates the action to 1960s Paris — all Gitanes, Mary Quant mini skirts and ill-advised games of Twister. George Johnson-Leigh’s designs reach for a contemporary demi-monde — a bit sexy, a bit sleazy — but fail to grasp it, and the relentless ugliness and tackiness soon pall. ‘Our goddess is hope’ the barman sings at the start, but if Manon’s only choice is between the convent and what looks like the lowest rung of sex slavery (her dancing lesson becomes a provocative photo shoot in her disturbingly infantilised pink-and-spangly bedroom), then hope is an illusion.

Love, too, is in doubt.

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