Love on manoeuvres

This is as close as Covent Garden lets itself get to doing Gilbert & Sullivan, and all that kind of stuff. Sure, Gaetano Donizetti’s 1840 opéra comique is in French, and therefore obviously way better and posher than anything English could possibly be, but in Laurent Pelly’s staging (first done here in 2007 and going strong), the absurdity is decorously dialled up, and the story itself (one of those lost-baby jobs of the sort G&S thrived on), though without any of Gilbert’s wit and paradox, is vaguely in the same family.

And naturally it all sounds pretty much like Sullivan, given how he blithely re-purposed the Donizetti idiom forty years later for his Londoners. Like G&S too, there’s a lot of chat, of a rather lower wattage: the script is not exactly going to have them rolling in the aisles, even as rewritten by Agathe Mélinand with a few epenthetic cries of “merde!” that represent the apogee of verbal comedy, and it is delivered, ça va sans dire, in generally mangled French by the usual polyglot Covent Garden cast (Spain, Peru, Italy, Scotland, and oh yeah, England) in a way that means the entire audience spends the whole time craning their necks to read the translation above the stage, and missing out on all the hilarity going on down there. This is great for the capital’s chiropractors, of course, but otherwise a really silly way of doing a show; but that’s opera for you: superannuated music sung to rich people in foreign languages… while they’re not even watching.

Despite all that, this is one of Covent Garden’s most treasurable shows: warm-hearted, nicely touching, just about funny enough, and still loveable after all these years. A couple of the original cast survive twenty years on (Juan Diego Flórez, of whom more later, and Donald Maxwell), others have come and gone, though they are for the most part basically channelling the originals. No, it doesn’t have all the old fizz; but the charm is still there. 

The story isn’t the most side-splitting thing ever written: a sentimental comedy about vivandière (a kind of improbably chaste mess-girl) Marie, an apparent orphan adopted as a baby by a French regiment, the fighting 21st, and becoming in due course their tomboy mascot. As they, er, liberate Tyrol (“feared by one sex and loved by the other”, apparently — but which?), Marie falls in love with an unsuitable Tyrolean peasant boy, and eventually overcomes the objections of her rediscovered Marchioness “aunt” (actually mother) to marry him. As mentioned, there are few actual jokes beyond Pelly’s visual ones. But what the piece does have, in spades, is the moral sweetness that lies at the heart of nearly everything Donizetti ― the kindest-natured of all composers ― ever wrote.

It actually starts with a promising bit of drama, terrified peasants putting saucepans on their heads and clutching pitchforks, expecting to be blown to bits by French cannons. That’s basically as big as the jeopardy gets, though: the peasants vanish, the inconvenient fact of invasion/occupation is politely never mentioned again, and the regiment turns out cute as hell. And Pelly gives us a couple of jolly scenes: one of the show’s selling points is the non-singing Duchess, variously played over the years by Dawn French, Miranda Richardson ― and Ann Widdecombe in panto-battleaxe mode… this time Tamsin Greig reprises the borderline-psycho high-horsery she has perfected over 25 years of comedy, to terrific effect, and another scene of ancien-regime fossils tottering about is probably even funnier than it was because it feels crueller now than it did then.

Well, everyone loves all that, and it’s good Pythonesque fun. But the real selling points to the show have always been the singers. Flórez has been a fixture for most of these 20 years, and carries off lederhosen-wearing Tonio (at a sprightly 53) just as boyishly as ever. More to the point, his voice is as extraordinary as before, with more depth and emotion too as the years go by. But what makes the house erupt is his showpiece at the end of Act 1, “Ah, mes amis”, as he astutely joins up with the regiment. Flórez has always had the most loveable aura of any singer, a tangible warmth, as well as the most sheerly beautiful voice that can do things literally nobody else can: a high tenor who doesn’t sound like one, with an elegant masculine timbre right to the top. The Tonio role is infamous for the nine top Cs in that aria ― and with most tenors, there’s a good deal of sphincter-clenching (on the part of both them and the audience) as those absurd high-jumps approach. But Flórez tosses them off for fun, effortless, debonair, like proper notes, proper singing, and it’s a weird and marvellous thing to hear.

This time, his oppo is the Spanish soprano Sara Blanch, and she is simply phenomenal. The role was created for the hyperactive, doll-like Natalie Dessay, and Ms Blanch absolutely makes it her own, with more energy, inventiveness and comic verve than is reasonable to expect: a wired, gamine, insouciantly brilliant performance, tossing off effortless, stratospheric roulades while performing a panoply of household drudgery or being carted about by the chorus, before melting into sentimental melancholy expressed through a heavenly legato, with a nice dark melancholy Spanish tinge. And she reels off the French speech like a native too, with actual expression and theatrical intelligence, while the rest plod along like a GCSE oral exam.

Between the fireworks, Donizetti lets the pair melt into pathos just often enough ― and when voices like this do that, cheap sentiment assumes the weight of grand romance. The backup roles are ok ― Sonia Ganassi as the preposterous secret mama, Paolo Bordogna the avuncular regimental sergeant ― the chorus well-drilled and winsome. Yves Abel conducts it very nicely, vivacious, elegant, a properly French (Donizetti, composing for Paris, knew his business) stylishness with understated emotion.

Properly viewed, La fille is an insubstantial creature, there’s hardly anything to it at all. It’s a kind of miracle that this little soufflé can still rise to the occasion. I guess they’ll need to find a new Flórez — even he can’t go on forever ― and good luck with that, but it’ll probably still be going in 2046.

Until July 24