Unlike his operatic forbear, Verdi, or his contemporary in Germany, Wagner, Puccini wasn’t interested in politics, nor are his operas motivated or driven by political issues, despite the implied politics of poverty in La bohème, or the tragic confrontation between Japan and America in Madama Butterflyfor instance. By restoring the former firmly to its original 1830s setting, and co-opting a range of artistic references from painters of that period, director David Geleson apparently means to bring a more overtly politicised dimension to the opera and focus on the revolutionary forces at work in French society from that decade down to 1848, which sought to limit or abolish monarchical government and extend democratic and civic rights for the citizenry at large.
That promises to wrest the opera from the charge of sentimentality or melodrama, or so it seemed to me, with the telling deployment in Act One of Delacroix’s The Massacre at Chios and Liberty Leading the People as the canvases which the painter Marcello may be working on. Those themes of upheaval and revolution bring into sharper focus some of the libretto’s allusions and symbolism, such as its reference to Louis Philippe the ‘citizen king’ and the implied hoped for progressive constitutional change, the landlord Benoît as the embodiment of rentier capitalism, or the image of Mimì and Rodolfo’s candles indicating possible hope but ultimately snuffed out. Drawing together such correspondences doesn’t really last beyond the first Act, after which the politics fall away and the production reverts to a perfectly decent, standard presentation of the work, though overlaid with some quotations from the poetry and writings of Baudelaire, Hugo, and Lamartine, and some further pictorial references. Even the soldiers’ march before Café Momus in Act Two is devoid of allusion to any external historical events and presented purely playfully.
The danger with this is that the characters’ supposed political or activist impulses become merely aestheticised and rendered effectively futile. Rather than Mimì’s death serving some purpose or acting as a beacon of hope – as Geselson’s director’s note seems to imply – that tragedy and the other characters’ actions appear unintentionally to be swaddled by their creative endeavours. Fully half of the stage in Act One is taken up by a reproduction of Delacroix’s Massacre, shunting the acted drama itself to the side. This itself takes place behind a thin gauze, as does Act Three, suggesting a dream-like state remote from public reality where any political action would be useless in any case. The poetic quotations develop the theme of Rodolfo and Mimì’s doomed love, but the effect is precisely to make the temper of the drama precious and turned away from the political realm, reducing it to the sentimental again (‘one must have a heart of stone not to laugh’ as Oscar Wilde didn’t say of this opera). The intensification of the candlelight image is clumsily handled by the moving around of large stage lights which can’t have existed in the 1830s, and doesn’t make any new dramatic point.
The ambiguity of the whole is compounded by prefacing the performance with an extract, played stirringly by full string ensemble, from Puccini’s Crisantemi – an elegy composed in earnest on the death, of all people, of an Italian prince who became king of Spain only to abdicate in the face of rising republicanism. Is it used with deliberate irony to hint at the hopelessness of the characters’ revolutionary tendencies? Or is the irony of its royal subject an unfortunate accident, and it stands simply as a lament for Mimì, and her and Rodolfo’s private, emotional hopes? Again, the apparently earnest use of art and culture doesn’t really square with the production’s politicised intentions. At best, the former serve as a consolation for failed political change, but not seemingly as a spur or aid to it, leading to a curiously muted, depressed interpretation of what art can do, and of the characters’ agency in this opera in the context of the 1830 and 1848 revolutions.
A cast of young singers in the principal roles breathes vitality into the music, even if they too seem somewhat reticent, though Luke Norvell brings lightness and freshness to the role of Rodolfo, Patrick Dow is a breezily cheery Marcello, and Isabela Diaz’s otherwise tenderly radiant Mimì opens out with defiant force, paradoxically, on her deathbed. More passion in ‘O soave fanciulla’ would have been welcome. Dan D’Souza and Jamie Woollard offer warm-hearted gravity by contrast as Schaunard and Colline, though William Dazeley never really comes into his own as either Benoît or Alcindoro. Thian Lois is more a characterful caricature than a fully-fledged singing soubrette as Musetta.
Richard Farnes leads the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in an invigorating account of the music which crackles with something of the fervour which is missing on stage. The middle two Acts in particular are filled with picaresque detail, for the scenes at Café Momus, and the altercations among the two pairs of lovers on a wintry dawn.
The seeds for a more interesting, politicised take on this warhorse of an opera are there. But this production – first staged at Nancy and seen elsewhere in France – might have looked across the English Channel for literary inspiration and taken the example of Dickens’s novels, which combine the aestheticism of vivid symbolism with charged political and social commentary, to create an art with a genuine outward message.
Curtis Rogers
La bohème
Composer: Giacomo Puccini
Libretto: Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa
Cast and production staff:
Mimì – Isabela Diaz; Rodolfo – Luke Norvell; Musetta – Thian Lois; Marcello – Patrick Dow; Schaunard – Dan D’Souza; Colline – Jamie Woollard; Benoît / Alcindoro – William Dazeley
Director – David Geselson; Designer – Lisa Navarro; Costume Designer – Benjamin Moreau; Lighting Designer – Jérémie Papin; Conductor – Richard Farnes; The Grange Festival Chorus; Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra
The Grange Festival; Northington, Hampshire, 2 June 2026
Photos: © Richard Hubert Smith