Review - Pelléas et Mélisande - Against the Grain Theatre, Toronto

✭✭✭✭✩

by Claude Debussy, directed by Joel Ivany

Against the Grain, Max Tanenbaum Courtyard Gardens, Toronto

June 19, 21, 23 & 25, 2014

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Against the Grain Theatre is currently presenting the most dramatically effective production of Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande you are ever likely to see. It is staged outdoors in the Max Tanenbaum Courtyard Gardens, a greenspace with a whimsical metalwork pavilion shaded by ginkgoes surrounded on three side by the Joey and Toby Tanenbaum Opera Centre, the headquarters of the Canadian Opera Company. Mounting an opera outdoors in downtown Toronto does have sonic drawbacks. But you can easily filter them out because the singing of the entire cast is so beautiful and the acting so truthful and engaging.

It is amazing how staging an opera like Pelléas et Mélisande in a small space completely changes one’s perception of it. Using most of the text of Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1893 symbolist play of the same name, set in a fairy-tale-like kingdom of Allemonde peopled by taciturn Pre-Raphaelite characters, the opera can seem emotionally and thematically distant when staged in a standard opera house. People tend to go to hear Debussy’s gorgeous score rather than become involved in its enigmatic story.

AtG’s staging changes all of that. The accompaniment is beautifully played on an upright Steinway piano, slightly amplified so that the sound fills the courtyard. The soloists sing often within three or four feet of the audience seating in shallow rows in an L-configuration on the north and east sides of the courtyard. Seeing the soloists sing and act in such close proximity completely draws you into the action. In an opera house the proscenium seems to cut the audience off from the wan, mysterious world on the other side. In fact, when the play was first acted, a layer of gauze was hung over the stage opening to deliberately emphasize the otherworldliness of Allemonde.

With the barrier between singer and audience broken, the nature of the libretto changes. It is well known that Debussy wrote the opera as an example of an anti-Wagnerian way forward for French opera to counteract France’s Wagnerian imitators like Chabrier’s Gwendoline (1866) or Chausson’s Le roi Arthus (1895). Unlike Wagner’s use of long poetic narratives, the characters in Maeterlinck seem barely able to complete their short prose sentence, most of which end in ellipses. In all previous productions of Pelléas that I’ve seen, the characters’ odd inability to expand on their ideas takes a while to get used to, especially when compared to the urgent storytelling of Wagner’s characters or the passionate outbursts of Verdi’s.

In the intimate setting of a courtyard, however, Maeterlinck’s style seems perfectly natural. It seemed as if Debussy were simply setting the conversation of shy, restrained people to music. Played up close, the singers as directed by Ivany could use the gaps in their conversations to complete through facial gesture or posture the beginning of the thought they had just sung. Thus the highly nuanced acting Ivany drew from the entire cast becomes central to demystifying the world of the characters and to drawing us into their lives.

It was eye-opening to experience a familiar opera in such a new way. Of course, no piano, even when as magnificently played as Julien LeBlanc does, can create the ever-shifting colours Debussy achieved with a full orchestra. Yet, the piano accompaniment has two advantages. First, it relates the music for the opera quite clearly to all of Debussy’s other piano music and art songs. And second, the piano reduction makes the structure of the score clearer than it does in orchestral form where we tend to be seduced by orchestral colour.

If the Max Tanenbaum Courtyard Gardens were located somewhere in the countryside, the experience would be ideal. As it is, even someone who lives downtown will be surprised at how noisy the city is. Traffic makes its low background hum. But there are planes and helicopters overhead. There is a fire station down the street that took a call. And for the first hour of the show, every building in the area had its air conditioning whirring away. On the plus side, it seems a pair of robins has a nest near the courtyard and sang their territorial “cheerio” throughout the first hour mixed with their typical “peek and tut” and whinnying calls of alarm as if so many humans moving about were frightening. These calls helped animate the forest scenes of the opera that Debussy has deliberately made gloomy.

While its takes more concentration to filter our background noise, it is not difficult when the singing is as glorious as it is here. A major treat for Torontonians is the chance to hear Québecois baritone Étienne Dupuis sing Pelléas, the first time he has sung a full operatic role in Toronto. Dupuis used to sing frequently at L’Opéra de Montréal before he made his breakthrough in Europe and now is a regular at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin. He has a gorgeous voice – dark, rich, lustrous – and sensitively brings out the meaning of his every word. This attention to detail is matched by the intensity of his acting. I don’t recall anyone conveying the emotional arc that Pelléas traverses with such clarity and depth.

Miriam Khalil is a lovely Mélisande. Dressed by designer Ming Wong in a gown like an ancient women’s chiton with her long dark hair in ringlets, Khalil looked like she has stepped out of a painting by Edward Burne-Jones. Her crystal-clear soprano with its hint of darkness perfectly suited the mysteriously withdrawn young woman. Khalil is not as fragile a Mélisande as some but fully communicated her character’s sense of oppression that even she does not fully understand.

Gregory Dahl makes an excellent Golaud as one might expect. Dahl’s Golaud is ultimately a sympathetic figure who repeatedly tries to suppress his jealously toward his half-brother Pelléas even though doing so only increases his anguish. His scene with Pelléas in the grottos is especially fine since Dahl makes us feel within his character the ongoing battle between malice and restraint.

When trying to see the closeness of Pelléas and Mélisande in a positive light, Golaud repeated refers to them as children. Ivany is the first director I’ve seen who picks up on this and shows in their actions the childish joy the couple feels, both at different times stepping from stone to stone outside the pavilion as in a game. The problem is that Allemonde is a world without innocence that crushes all who still possess it.

Alain Coulombe is in fine majestic voice as the king Arkel as is Megan Latham as his queen Geneviève. Andrea Núñez is excellent as Golaud’s son, Yniold. She makes Yniold’s scene where Golaud forces the child to spy on Pelléas and Mélisande frighteningly real and distressing.

By taking Debussy’s opera out of the opera house, Against the Grain accomplishes one of its main goals of giving an audience a fresh view of a familiar work. This opera in particular because of its symbolist text all too often can appear as quaint and cobwebby and too remote from the realities of human life. Ivany’s approach completely banishes this notion to reveal the work’s vitality in the struggle of the characters to be good people in a fallen world. This Pelléas and Mélisande is yet another stirling success for this innovative company.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

For tickets, visit www.againstthegraintheatre.com.

2014-06-20

Pelléas and Mélisande