Romantic squalor

La Bohème
English National Opera

The Demon
Barbican

Of all the most popular operas of Puccini, La Bohème is the one that has attracted least critical fire, and that, even during the long period when highbrows were required to despise him, was exempted from the general interdict. Even though the heroine dies a harrowing death, at least it is from natural causes, she is surrounded by people who love her, and her brief happiness earlier in the opera is set to the most gorgeous, and two of the lengthiest, arias that Puccini ever wrote. So the element of sadism that is so disturbing in several of the other operas is wholly absent here, and for all the cold and hunger and illness the drama and the music conjure a prelapsarian world.

Not only has Bohème proved producer-proof, on the whole producers have contented themselves with mild adjustments to the period in which it is set, and haven’t found ways to ‘deconstruct’ it. Jonathan Miller is, in any case, opposed to deconstructive productions, and that may have some connection to his otherwise inexplicable absence in the UK as an operatic director in the past 20 years, about which he has been justifiably outspoken. His new production of Bohème has been much speculated about but, now that we have witnessed it, it turns out to be extraordinarily inconspicuous. He is quoted in the programme as saying, ‘I want to make it as much like a movie as it could possibly be. I’m basing the artists’ relationship on the movie Withnail and I — shabby, upper-class boys who think squalor is very romantic.’ If he hadn’t said it you would never have guessed. The sets, uniformly colourless and depressing, move with admirable speed to ensure there’s no break at all between the first two acts, and between the last two.