Sadistic and repellent and thrilling: Mascagni’s Iris reviewed

If you’ve ever felt that poor Madama Butterfly had a bit of a raw deal, then you really, really don’t want to know what happens in Mascagni’s Iris. Take that as a spoiler alert: our Japanese heroine is so young that as the opera opens, she’s playing with a doll. She’s abducted, installed in a brothel and offered up for the delectation of a noble client, whose advances she is too innocent to comprehend. Disowned by her blind father, by the beginning of Act Three she’s literally lying in a sewer listening to disembodied voices telling her that nothing could have prevented this outcome. Obviously, it sounds exquisite.

You don’t have to be a social justice warrior to find Iris a bit much. Mascagni and his librettist Illica (who wrote Butterfly six years later) call their male leads Osaka and Kyoto — that’s about the level of their engagement with Japanese culture. And while Butterfly at least has the courage of her convictions, the child-like Iris, with her ‘eyes like camellias’, is a hopelessly naive, impossibly passive fantasy object. The only legitimate response is pity. Misogyny has become the opera-hater’s all-purpose j’accuse: yet in Iris, the male characters are so one-dimensionally loathsome that the piece is practically a libel against masculinity.

The conductor Stuart Stratford effectively acknowledged as much in a brief spoken introduction to this concert performance by the orchestra and chorus of Scottish Opera. Iris has been credibly staged in recent years (most notably by the verismo salvage experts at Opera Holland Park) and a director, Roxana Haines, was credited here. But after a week of (apparently) flu-ridden rehearsals which culminated in the loss of Helena Dix as Iris, and her last minute replacement by Kiandra Howarth, any attempt at semi-staging had understandably been jettisoned.