Scent and sensibility

Patrick Mason’s new production of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette reminded me of something, but it took a while to work out what. We saw shiny black walls with chrome Bauhaus details, and a swirl of mist through which beautiful people moved in black formal wear. Then Olena Tokar made her entrance as Juliette, and as she pirouetted about the stage, evening dress sparkling, it clicked. It’s a perfume advert. The artificiality, the chic, the sexy little hint of affluence with top notes of fascism: you half-expected billowing curtains to reveal a giant bottle of Chanel No. 5.

It fitted right in at West Horsley, where the programme book contains adverts for private equity firms and first nights begin with an onstage shout-out to Laurent-Perrier. If it were an hour shorter, Roméo et Juliette might even be the perfect opera for a certain segment of the country-house circuit. Everyone knows the story and while it has its moments the young lovers’ death scene is certainly no ‘Liebestod’. It’s the product of a slightly kinky operatic tradition, rooted in French classicism, that enjoys the sensation of emotions within elegantly proscribed boundaries, and knows that not everything has to be profound.

Gounod delivers transient pleasures in sumptuous profusion: whether the Grande Cuvée sparkle of an anachronistic waltz song, the languishing curves of his melodies or the way he saturates his score with colours that glow from within. And then, gracefully, it slips from the memory. Nothing here to put you off your picnic. Mason and the designer Francis O’Connor handled it with style, though I’m not sure that having the Capulets dressed as Mussolini’s Blackshirts (the setting was a glamourised 1930s Italy) didn’t skew the central conflict too heavily, or that it was wise to have Tybalt’s ghost appear, Banquo-like, at critical moments later in the drama when everything prior to his death had seemed basically naturalistic, in a Baz Luhrmann sort of way.