Richard Bratby

Scottish power

Plus: the only real disappointment in the CBSO’s concert performance of The Yeoman of the Guard was that it was a one-off

‘Perhaps in this world nothing ever happens without purpose,’ sings old, blind King Arkel in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, and that at least is something to hold on to. God knows, you need it. Peel away the fairy-tale trappings of Maeterlinck’s original play, and the world of this opera is profoundly cruel. Its characters are often passive observers of their own fate (Pelléas admits before his final scene that he’s never yet returned his beloved Mélisande’s gaze). And yet Debussy pretty much compels you to feel for them, in a score of all-but-unbearable tenderness and beauty. It’s only once you’ve left the theatre that, wrestling with the pieces of this ravishing, troubling puzzle, you realise that it’s either insoluble — or that it offers a message bleaker than any Gotterdämmerung.

Wisely, David McVicar’s new production for Scottish Opera leaves its options open. The cast wears Edwardian costume of the operatic variety — the sort where men in frock-coats carry huge medieval swords. Advance publicity suggested that the production would be inspired by the paintings of Vilhelm Hammershoi and the programme duly reproduces a couple of chilly Nordic interiors. Someone clearly got the memo about Scandi chic being over, though, because the sets looked nothing like that. Tree trunks poke through the floors of designer Rae Smith’s decaying mansion; floorboards lift to reveal stagnant pools and the walls shimmer with gold and silver. McVicar and his lighting designer Paule Constable respond with moments of visual wonder to match Maeterlinck and Debussy’s imagery of light and water: doves become ominous, fluttering black forms, and a vengeful Golaud quietly appears, just as Mélisande predicts, at the end of her shadow. McVicar is sometimes dismissed as a safe pair of hands. But here he demonstrates that a staging can illuminate the story without being clunkingly literal, while leaving generous scope for the performers to give of themselves.

That, compellingly, is what Carolyn Sampson did as Mélisande.

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