LA COMMEDIA E FINITA! (oh no it’s not)
The title is the first line, delivered by a furious Leoncavallo in 1893 Milan. It is a time of wild flowering in opera , old Verdi’s grandeur and success inspiring a host of lesser composers. Alasdair Buchan’s anxious, keenly schoolboyish Leoncavallo, after his Pagliacci success, is terrified of being a one-hit wonder like Ponchielli or poor old Mascagni with Cavalliera.
His wife Berthe tries to calm and reassure him, but the poor chap is enraged with the very existence, and visible smugness, of the more suave Puccini. The latter wanders in, eavesdropping: Sebastian Torkia a vision of horrid confidence, all velveteen coat and shiny coiffure. We soon discover why: over a cautiously collegiate coffee in the Galeria Puccini had asked his supposed friend and artistic colleague what his new opera will be about. On learning that it is based on young Parisian bohemian lives in a book of short stories, Puccini says that curiously, he is doing the same in his La Boheme.
Leoncavallo doesn’t believe him, reckons he’s stolen the idea. It’s an 1890’s Boheme-off, no mercy. Puccini reckons he’ll win anyway if they both do it. So it’s a story about a story, and a rivalry, and more importantly about art itself. Which, in a likeable conclusion, even Puccini admits shouldn’t be a competition. It was the beauty of that truth at last, in the second act of James Inverne’s play, that made me properly enjoy it. I had thought of it for a while mainly as a nice quirky oddity for us opera-victims: I can’t speak for experts but have had a lifetime of amohitheatrical emotional catharses in the cheapest seats I can find, and ridden the great rolling rides of feeling conjured by Verdi and his contemporaries: heart-food.
Quirky it certainly is, the three actors occasionally having to expand the personnel , going meta to swop over (Lisa-Anne Wood as Berta at one stage irritably being made to take over the role of Gustav Mahler, of whom both men appear to be in awe). Torkia has most fun, his face expressing every degree of mischief; Buchan draws most sympathy. It’s demotic, slangily up to date, playful, with occasional snatches of aria from Berta, taking us fascinatingly through the way things developed.
For they both wrote Bohemes; first PUccini’s got bad reviews in Torino, Leoncavallo,having cried “Sweet Jesus, it’s a flop!!) . He was thrilled to get his own into La Fenice (where the chaise-longue briefly becomes a gondola) but Puccini then played his just down the road, undermining him. More meta-switches, as one becomes a ticket tout saying Puccini’s selling out. Leoncavallo has a triumph, though, and Mahler rudely says Puccini’s is “Hpllow, vulgar, disgusting”. But it becomes clear whose will last.
But there’s no triumph. They both know how much the sheer emotion and humanity they strive to express in music is what counts – “I’ts got to be great or what’s the point?” When Leoncavallo lies depressed , refusing to work, it’s Torkia’s Puccini who arrives uninvited and goads him back to the piano, assisted by Berthe (“when you’re an artist’s wife you know how to pick him up when he’s knocked down. By a great artist”. he says) Which is significant because Puccini’s own wife, occasionally taken on in a fur stole by Lisa-Anne Wood, is of not prone to consoling him or forgiving his womanizing. So in a personal sense Leoncavallo has won. But in the end neither triumph or defeat can matter. The music does.
parktheatre.co.uk to 9 Aug
rating 4
theatreCat 