I had a real epiphany watching Anthony Minghella’s production of Puccini’s other masterpiece, Madama Butterfly (which also originated at the ENO), at the Met a couple of years ago. That production was the best designed and conceptualized work of art I have thus far experienced. Each gorgeous visual sequence gave way to something even more breathtaking, and also somehow appeared utterly effortless, as if each scene was a natural extension of the music itself. Below, some photographs of the production.
The final scene of Butterfly’s death (the final two pictures are taken from this scene) was a thing of indescribable profundity and beauty. I will never forget it. This production is in the current repertory at the Met, and I urge you to go to experience it! With the phenomenal $20 general rush tickets (for wonderful orchestra seats!) available, it’s also one of the cheapest nights out available in New York!
So, it is with high expectations that I went to Turandot. Goold (soon to be represented on Broadway by his production of Lucy Prebble's new play Enron) has become one of the most sought after directors in the U.K. following his breakthrough production of Macbeth which played at BAM before transferring to Broadway last season. I admired that production greatly, chiefly for its ability to maintain the dramaturgical focus on Patrick Stewart’s Macbeth. I have seen many productions that have skewed toward Lady Macbeth, but this is a character whose primary action (to urge Macbeth to kill Duncan) is over quite soon, and who is then severed from the main action of the play. Goold’s first opera was quite a different Turandot than any other. His main goal seems to have been to provide an ending to Puccini's unfinished opera. He inserted the frame of an author writing the story of the play for the first time. The author sits in a Chinese restaurant bustling with characters from every walk of life and gradually transforms them all into characters in the myth of Turandot. The serving ladies become dominatrices, a homeless drunk who stumbles in transforms into the Emperor, and Turandot is represented by an ice sculpture until her entrance late in the second act. The first two acts take place in the front of the restaurant, and the last act, in which the Nameless Stranger waits to see whether or not Turandot can discover his name and insodoing claim the right to execute him, takes us backstage, into the kitchen of the restaurant. Below, some pictures from the production.
The kitchen seems to figure strongly in Goold’s dramaturgical imagination. Those of you who caught his Macbeth will remember that the primary setting for the entire play was a basement kitchen that transformed from a domestic setting into the outdoors through projected images on the shiny white tiles. It seems to be a place where violent actions literally reach boiling point and explode. In Turandot, the violence that seems to be inevitable is sublimed by the exquisite Nessun Dorma into a love of absolute tenderness. This happens at the cost of the author’s own life. In Goold’s production, the author is killed in place of the Nameless Stranger, and it is only that sacrifice that allows the love story to reach its climax. The final tableau puts the author on the sacrificial altar of the stove while the rest of the company celebrate the union between our protagonist and his love. Goold discusses his choices with Turandot in a remarkably candid essay published in The Guardian. At times baffling and contradictory, Goold’s work clearly revels in ambitious concepts, intense dramaturgical inquiry and dynamic visual gestures. I look forward to his next productions with eagerness, primarily because I now know that they will be actively engaged dialogues with the source material.
(posted by Ed)
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