Lakmé

by Léo Delibes

seen at Holland Park on 15 July 2015

This is a new production directed by Aylin Bozok and conducted by Matthew Waldren, with Fflur Wyn as Lakmé, Robert Murray as Gérald, David Soar as Nilakantha, Nicholas Lester as Frédéric and Katie Bray as Mallika.

The opera reflects the late nineteenth (and early twentieth) century European fascination with 'the East'. Notionally set in India where British supremacy is causing unrest amongst the Hindu population, it uses this background only to lavish attention on yet another mysterious and ostensibly unavailable woman (Lakmé) and on her response to love offered by someone supposedly inappropriate. In generic terms this is rather like the situation between Turandot and Calaf, except that this time it is Lakmé's father Nilakantha (a Brahmin priest) who channels all the anger, and the opera ends with Lakmé's self-sacrifice, a rather more tragic example of love triumphant. 

Musically the piece has virtually no Oriental flavour. Unlike Puccini, who was interested in giving hints of Chinese music to 'Turandot' and of Japanese to 'Madama Butterfly', Delibes is satisfied to produce wonderful but entirely 'western' music. Fflur Wyn sang the difficult part of Lakmé beautifully; the Flower Duet with Katie Bray as her servant Mallika shimmered, while the technically demanding Bell Song seemed almost effortless. She was ably supported by Robert Murray as Gérald the bewildered lover and by David Soar as her commanding and vengeful father.

It is hard to take the Indian setting particularly seriously, as there seems to be little attention to what Hindu religious practices and sensibilities might really be like. It is all 'mysterious Orient' stuff - special wells of water, utterly poisonous flowers, and so forth. Warnings that the young English people might be trespassing on sacred ground are raised but quickly dismissed as trivial by the girls. A photograph of an earlier Holland Park production shows costumes which would not be out of place in an Aladdin pantomime, with someone (presumably the loyal servant Hadji) blue-skinned to boot, and one can see the temptation to exoticise everything as much as possible.

In this new production, a completely different idea has taken shape. The costumes for the chorus are not culturally specific. The English women look Edwardian and their menfolk are in khaki. Lakmé, her father and her entourage are dressed richly but by no means caricatured. The importance of flowers - not only the famous flower duet, but also the poisonous flower and other references to blossoms - is emphasised by the use of black openwork screens shaped like giant petals, which open to reveal a central golden gazebo in which Lakmé (or her dancer avatar Lucy Starkey) is discovered. This quite simple set gains more and more resonance as the evening progresses.

Everything thus becomes dream like - but whose dream is it? Gérald several times claims to be dreaming, to be in a daze from which his friend Frédéric urges him to awake. The idea that we are witnessing Gérald's inner turmoil is strengthened by the curious abstraction of even the most dramatic point of the piece: when Nilakantha stabs him, there is no knife and the two figures are not even close to each other. Instead, all the men in the chorus mime a stabbing action in unison with Nilakantha, and Gérald doubles over in agony. This is only one of several episodes in which charaters move in a dreamlike way - gestures unified and even hieratic.

All in all, the visual style, unfussy yet at times hypnotic, allowed the sheer beauties of the score to triumph - a most successful production.