Adès - The Exterminating Angel, at the Paris Opera

ONP Bastille, Wednesday March 6 2024

Conductor: Thomas Adès. Production: Calixto Bieito. Sets: Anna-Sofia Kirsch. Costumes: Ingo Krügler. Lighting: Reinhard Traub. Lucía de Nobile: Jacquelyn Stucker. Leticia Maynar: Gloria Tronel. Leonora Palma: Hilary Summers. Silvia de Ávila: Claudia Boyle. Blanca Delgado: Christine Rice. Beatriz: Ilanah Lobel-Torres (replacing Amina Edris). Edmundo de Nobile: Nicky Spence. Count Raúl Yebenes: Frédéric Antoun. Colonel Álvaro Gómez: Jarrett Ott. Francisco de Ávila: Anthony Roth Costanzo. Eduardo: Filipe Manu. Señor Russell: Philippe Sly. Alberto Roc: Paul Gay. Doctor Carlos Conde: Clive Bayley. Julio – Butler: Thomas Faulkner. Lucas – Footman: Julien Henric. Enrique – Waiter: Nicholas Jones. Pablo – Cook: Andres Cascante. Meni – Maid: Ilanah Lobel-Torres. Camila – Maid: Bethany Horak-Hallett. Padre Sansón: Régis Mengus. Yoli: member of the Hauts de Seine children's choir. Orchestra and Chorus of the Opéra National de Paris.

Photos: Agathe Poupeney/ONP

I'm not sure, and am too lazy to count, how many times I've started a post by remarking how much easier it is to describe a show where everything goes wrong, than one where everything goes right. I'm sitting here wondering how I can adequately portray Paris's new production of The Exterminating Angel, other than saying it was precisely, pile-poil, spot-on. I've praised Bieito's stagecraft on this blog before. He knows his trade. Other people's productions of this work have been described online as tame or static (as static, even, as Sellars' L'Amour de Loin, which is saying something). Bieito, on the contrary, contrived to give the impression of near-breathtakingly non-stop action.

Not being interested in films is sometimes a handicap for me. Warlikowski, for example, often uses clips from famous ones to support his concepts, and I find myself Googling up old Hollywood titles to find out what he's getting at. I've never seen Buñuel's work, so I read up on it beforehand. A group of grands bourgeois invited to dinner after a performance of Lucia di Lammermoor find themselves mysteriously unable to leave, and as time goes by, shed their manners and sink into chaotic, sordid depravity. 'Sharply satirical and allegorical,' says Wikipedia, 'the film contains a depiction of the aristocracy that suggests they "harbor savage instincts and unspeakable secrets" - a quote from a US film critic that reminds me of Ivy Compton-Burnett's conviction that families conceal what, in her gnomic way, she just called 'deeds': the lies, deception, theft, abuse, incest, murder and so on that occur so lightly in her novels.

 

The production is staged in a single set: a large, charmless, all-white room with no windows, but a glazed ceiling and double doors at the rear. This, with its curved walls, suggests an apse - the protagonists don't actually leave and go to church for the Te Deum (click through to read the plot on Wikipedia); the bells in the score, the passing padre, a cross on one chair and the shape of the room merely suggest it. A giant chandelier is wheeled out by the servants, leaving behind the long dinner table, neatly set with candelabra, flowers and folded napkins, a grand piano, and lots of identical, oval-backed chairs upholstered in red velvet (one of which has, as I just mentioned, a cross pasted on). By the end, this orderly space will be wrecked: floorboards ripped up to find water in the piping below, holes bashed through the walls, human waste behind the table, human remains under bloody sheets, chic evening clothes ripped off and strewn about with abandoned sheepskins... The lighting is bright and natural, only occasionally dimming or changing colour to mark changes of mood in the score and plot (this production should transfer well to video, as it surely must). The action is bookended by little Yoli, with the padre, trailing a bunch of sheep-shaped balloons, and the accompanying bear is a giant, stuffed one (again, click through to read the plot on Wikipedia). It ends with something of a coup de théâtre: the whole, vast room slowly rotates so that, as they finally escape their mad confinement, the characters do so through the double doors, facing the audience, frozen in attitudes of crazed glee.

 

Like Adès in his score, for each of the 20 to 25 soloists, Bieito constructs a distinct, individual character. Everyone, every second, has something specific and relevant to do. There's no standing around, arms dangling, here (I'll write about Peter Sellar's unaccountably nerveless new production of Beatrice di Tenda, where there's little else, in a few days). Movements are subtly choreographed, with orrery-like precision, so that without its coming across as obvious, characters are brought to the front when they have to sing, then retreat to do their business - in every sense of the word, as the decline of standards accelerates - elsewhere. The demands made on some of the soloists reminded me of Romeo Castellucci's production of Das Rheingold in Brussels last November, calling for their total commitment, beyond the usual calls of duty. Anthony Roth Costanzo, for example, is spared nothing, defecating all too visibly in his shorts after hurling himself repeatedly at the walls, and ending up, in a borrowed evening dress, clutching at pills on the floor. It's all fearlessly grim and gruesome, yet also sometimes comical, and brilliantly done. A virtuoso production, where music and acting cohere absolutely, forming a whole: 'art total,' as a friend of mine put it online.

With so many excellent soloists on stage (the chorus, as is often now the case, remained hidden), it would be potentially invidious to single out one or the other, or even hint at a weak link, musically or dramatically. Everyone was firing on all cylinders, without a single chute de tension. Jacquelyn Stucker radiated physical and vocal glamour, just as Hilary Summers exuded patrician battiness. Nicky Spence (who seems to be popping up with a cheeky grin everywhere these days) was as breezily charismatic here as playing Loge, as if the world were his, in Brussels. Anthony Roth Costanzo I've already mentioned. I'd never heard him live before and was impresed by the strength of his voice in a role so physically demanding - and from such a slight frame. Frédéric Antoun cut a figure as elegant and handsome as his singing. Gloria Tronel attacked Leticia's impossibly high tessitura fearlessly. Jarrett Ott sang firmly and warmly in his boxers and nothing else, and Clive Bayley was as resounding as the diehard rational Conde as Philippe Sly, on very sound form, as Russell. Ilanah Lobel-Torres showed no sign at all of standing in on short notice, and formed an engaging, convincing couple with Filipe Manu's Eduardo. And so on... My apologies to those not mentioned, but the whole cast was strikingly evenly-matched, and this could, unstopped, go on for a long time...

The one issue with this otherwise outstanding evening was nothing to do with either the score, the conducting, the singing or the production. The problem was acoustic. My companions and I prefer to be near to the action, but sometimes, at the Bastille, you pay the price metaphorically as well as literally. Whatever the opposite of acoustic 'sweet spots' is, the Bastille has them in the parterre, and on Wednesday I was in one. Having enjoyed Powder her Face in Brussels, to some extent despite Trelinski's production, I was looking forward to hearing another Adès score. From where I was sitting, I could tell there were some very juicy moments and, at least in the earlier part of the work, some witty ones, and the orchestra seemed to be responding well to Adès's own, precise conducting. But I couldn't hear the inner details, and will have, I think, to buy the existing DVD (of the Met production), or at least listen to the symphony Adès drew from the opera, available freely on YouTube. I hope, though, that this production will come out on video, via one channel or another, as such a success deserves to be widely admired. The clip below, presumably made at rehearsals or very early in the run, doesn't display quite the same absolute assurance as the performance I saw.