Composer: Verdi
Director: Eleanor Strutt
Musical Director: Ben Woodward
Fringe opera has rather exploded in this country over the past decade, and it is not hard to see why. Appetite for the art form has grown, yet the traditional houses, the London Coliseum, home of English National Opera, and the Royal Opera House, chief among them, remain, for all their concessions and cheaper seats, stubbornly expensive. Into that gap has stepped a growing band of fringe companies, offering the devoted and the merely curious alike a chance to see what all the fuss is about without remortgaging the house.
Regents Opera is one such company, and in their retelling of Verdi’s Rigoletto at the Bloomsbury Theatre, they have committed themselves wholeheartedly to the minimalist cause. A five-piece band, cello, keyboards, two clarinets and a flute, provides the entire musical support for an 11-strong ensemble, headed by Oliver Gibbs in the title role and Luci Briginshaw as Gilda, his lovelorn daughter.
Rigoletto is Verdi at his darkest: a hunchbacked court jester who mocks the grieving and is cursed for it, a licentious Duke (Gareth Dafydd Morris) who seduces the jester’s cloistered daughter, and a hired assassin whose bungled contract brings the whole thing crashing down in tragedy. It is a big, melodramatic, blood-and-thunder piece, and it is a bold move indeed to take something on this scale and pare it back to the absolute bone.
The modest budget and the slender band, though, are both outdone in sheer economy by the visual setting. The stage is, to all intents and purposes, empty. An L-shaped raised platform sits centre stage, behind which the tiny band is more or less concealed. Beyond a standing candelabra, some fake candles at the foot of the stage, a wooden bench and a wooden gate, there is nothing. The rest is black. In surroundings this bare, the imagination has to do a great deal of the heavy lifting, and the narrative needs to be crystal clear.
Which is where the trouble begins. Viewed through a modern lens, the Rigoletto story is already politically, socially and morally out of step, and, at times, frankly absurd. There is a moment when Rigoletto stands blindfolded, holding a ladder, while a trio of courtiers abduct his daughter from under his nose. The narrative here feels heavily truncated, and the cuts expose holes that leave the whole arc losing its footing at key moments. Why, for instance, does Gilda fail to recognise that the object of her affections is a Duke, when by her own account she sees him every week at church? He passes himself off as a penniless student the moment she declares her love, but surely he has not been keeping up that pretence, week in and week out, on the church steps. Play the piece straight and pared back like this, and you leave the audience nowhere to look but at the plot’s seams.
The narrative is only part of it. Stripping out the orchestra, or at least reducing it this drastically, robs us of all the majesty of Verdi’s score. Worse, Verdi’s particular genius lies in overlapping voices carrying several narratives at once, an intricate weave of melody and rhythm. Without musical backing powerful enough to hold all that up, the great ensemble passages stop being syncopation and become, instead, little more than noise. Jarring noise, at that.
The individual voices are all perfectly decent, especially for a fringe company. Gibbs gives us a solid, sturdy Rigoletto, and Briginshaw as Gilda is very engaging indeed. Morris fares less well as the Duke; his voice, perhaps through earlier strain, struggles at the top of the register and loses much of its power as it climbs. The rest of the cast are well enough equipped for their roles, at least musically.
The acting is another matter. It is played very much on the nose, and this may well be deliberate, an attempt to compensate for staging that offers so few clues as to what is going on. Gestures are overwrought, facial contortions overblown, and the supposed comedy from the three courtiers lands somewhere closer to a 1940s Tom and Jerry cartoon than to Verdi. The direction only labours the point further. There is precious little subtlety on offer here; it is all played in big, broad strokes.
That approach might have passed muster 40 or 50 years ago, but set against the sophistication of a modern audience, it all feels rather crude, and all the more incongruous given how austere the staging around it is. The stripped-back setting could have opened the door to a genuinely interesting reading of both the drama and the score. Instead, it is played straight and loud, and somewhere in the collision, it loses the joy and the passion that make the music what it is.
And yet it would be churlish to be too hard on it. Judged against the West End or one of the major houses, this would struggle to earn its keep. But that is not what this is. This is a small company doing Verdi on a shoestring, and there is a certain gallantry in that which deserves acknowledgement. For lovers of Verdi, of Rigoletto in particular, and of opera in general, the chance to hear the piece performed vocally and in traditional form but scaled right down does offer an intriguing angle on something many will know inside out. It refocuses the ear, and it refocuses the attention on the narrative, and for plenty of people, that will be interesting enough. For plenty more, the simple pleasure of seeing opera sung to a decent standard, live and at a thoroughly reasonable price, will be reward enough in itself. It is far from the finished article, but there is heart here, and ambition, and on the fringe, both count for a great deal.
Reviewed on 17 July and continues to tour
