Painful triangle

The Royal Opera’s season isn’t awash with new productions, in fact until Christmas only has two thirds of one, but that was what it got under way with: all three short operas of Puccini’s Il Trittico, with Gianni Schicchi revived, and Il Tabarro and Suor Angelica fresh; they are all produced, and mainly very well, by Richard Jones, but each with a different designer. For the gritty naturalism of Il Tabarro (The Cloak), Ultz provides a range of blacks and greys, hardly redolent of the Paris where the opera is set, but adequately lowering to the spirits.

Tabarro begins with a swaying Debussy-esque figure, conveying the movement of the river and barges, but, also, cleverly in this production, the eternal procession of weighed-down stevedores. The pervasiveness of drudgery, boredom and frustration is so strongly established in the opening moments that much of the rest of the opera seems superfluous. Puccini is always intent on conveying the quotidian atmosphere in which sensational events will occur, but here he might be thought to do it all too efficiently. One of the very few cardinal rules of art is that you mustn’t convey boredom by being boring, but Puccini comes perilously close to breaking it. Though the piece lasts for just an hour, it feels longer because the events that precede the ultra-brief dénouement are in large part unrelated to it.

The painful triangle of the ageing barge-owner Michele, his miserable wife Giorgetta and Luigi, with whom she is having a perfunctory affair, is sketched in lightly some way in, Giorgetta has an aptly truncated semi-love duet with Luigi, a recriminatory scene with Michele, and time passes until Luigi mistakes the signal for the rendezvous and is killed by Michele. There are lashings of local lack-of-colour to keep the thing going, but Puccini self-denyingly avoids the lyricism which is his greatest gift.