A heavily pregnant woman offers herself provocatively to a young man. An abused child plays with a flock of toy sheep, imagining in his trauma that they are to be sent to the slaughterhouse. A tormented husband forces his son to peer through a shattered glass aperture to spy on his wife's possible adultery. These are some of the images from Graham Vick's brave, cruel yet lyrical production of Pelléas Et Mélisande. The production marks Vick's return to form after a bad patch that has lasted several years.
Locating the opera at the time of its premiere (1902), Vick has stripped away the familiar trappings while preserving its essential mystery. There are no forests, cliffs, turrets or caverns, only an illumination of the psychological pinnacles and abysses of a group of people who remain unknowable to themselves and to each other in a world riddled with repression. Paul Brown's extraordinary set is a claustrophobic, gilded bell-jar, cluttered with bric-a-brac and dominated by a colossal twisting staircase. It's a landscape at once opulent and sterile, in which nature and with it, life and spontaneity, has been throttled: a tree decays in a glass case; a stuffed eagle, pinioned in flight, is impaled on a wooden stand.
It is a world in which Mélisande the outsider who yearns for light and openness will never survive. We first see her, naked and timorous, crawling from beneath the white sheet that will become her shroud. When she next appears, her beauty cramped into an Edwardian frock, we know she is stifled, and doomed. Vick has already captured her weird ambiguity. Confronted by Golaud, she nestles her head in his groin, an act at once naive and alarmingly sexual.
It is a measure of the greatness of Christiane Oelze's performance that her every gesture can be interpreted as either supremely innocent or flagrantly knowing, and it is a mark of Vick's brilliance that the ambivalent incomprehensibility of human action is observed through-out. Pelléas (Richard Croft, equally strong) and Mélisande romp round the furniture with a tactile physicality, at once playful and erotic. Gwynne Howell's seemingly worldly-wise Arkel is not above pawing Mélisande's body. When Golaud announces that Mélisande is pregnant, Pelléas reacts with shock and we realise that we don't know who is the father of the child.
Little Yniold observes it all, and his life will be blighted by it. It is no wonder that Golaud, also the victim of this fetid atmosphere, psychologically disintegrates: John Tomlinson, his superlative bass clotting with anguish, gives the performance of a lifetime.
It is not all unremittingly bleak, however, for these maimed souls are held together by Debussy's music, which enfolds them in its sensual beauty and grieves for them with infinite compassion. The orchestral web is illuminated with great tenderness by Andrew Davis and played with faultless warmth by the LPO. The whole is a remarkable achievement that leaves you drained, shaken and profoundly moved an uncomfortable experience, yet one that is infinitely rewarding.
