Review: LA FILLE DU REGIMENT, Royal Ballet And Opera
Tamsin Greig cameos in Donizetti's comic opera about alpine love
All's fair in love and war — at least until the hero storms in on a tank. With Tamsin Greig playing a hilarious cameo, Laurent Pelly's production of Donizetti's comic opera returns to Covent Garden for its fifth outing.
Frothy as the storyline is, Gaetano Donizetti's La fille du régiment caused real critical ructions when it first opened in 1840. Composed during his self-imposed Parisian exile in the late 1830s, it was the composer's first opera set to a French libretto — and its premiere drew a hostile press spearheaded by Hector Berlioz, whose xenophobic objections to Italian composers monopolising the city's opera houses could not prevent the opera from becoming a massive success.
Ironically for Berlioz, one reason his outcry failed was the endearing, witty — if slightly bonkers — storyline by Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges and Jean-François Bayard. After being found as a baby on a battlefield, Marie is brought up as a mascot by an entire regiment of French soldiers (which she calls her "daddies"). She promises them and their sergeant Sulpice that she will only marry a soldier from their ranks. Two problems arise: firstly, she falls madly in love with a dashing young Tyrolean peasant, Tonio; then her real mother, the Marquise of Berkenfield, arrives with plans to marry her off into the eccentric Crakentorp dynasty.
The set design of angular hills and mountains made out of map fragments nods not just to the opera's setting but to the treacherous terrain the singers must overcome. Tonio's Act I aria "Ah! mes amis, quel jour de fête" requires the tenor to negotiate eight written high Cs, plus a ninth that is unwritten but universally expected. It's a tough ask, but one reason Juan Diego Flórez has been recalled after originating the role at Covent Garden in 2007. Some might say the 53-year-old is a little long in the tooth to be gambolling about the Alps as the young Tonio; those people would do well to watch Flórez defy both age and expectation.
His chemistry with Sara Blanch (playing Marie in her ROH debut) occasionally seems more mechanical than natural, but both show real warmth towards the material. She has the tougher physical role, singing while flat on the ground, held aloft by soldiers, or flouncing about in a dress you could hide the Matterhorn in. Pelly puts her through her operatic paces: one minute giddily skipping around the Alpine scenery like Julie Andrews on a particularly good morning; the next mournfully delivering "Il faut partir."
Now that Greig has settled happily into the "do whatever I damn well please" phase of her career, it's a joy to see her dominate the Royal Opera House stage in a minor but highly memorable role as the matriarch of the Crakentorps. The part is pure comic relief, but Greig turns in a tour de force, lending a wicked edge to what could have been panto-villain shtick. In a mixture of fluent French and mock-angry English ad libs, she takes deliciously sharp issue with both the orchestra's repetitive strains and the unseen son she plans to offload onto Marie (he's off watching the World Cup).
If anything holds the night back from perfection, it is down in the pit. Conductor Yves Abel opens with a thunderous overture that could win applause on its own; from there, though, he can't quite keep up with a score that needs constant encouragement to match the antics onstage.
In Pelly's hands, this is a jaunty opera that bounds along with zip and zany invention. The rapturous finale sees Tonio and Marie's daddies rescue her from the clutches of the crazy Crakentorps in a tank (a tank!). If war is God's way of teaching people geography, opera is here to remind us that there is always one family more dysfunctional than yours.
La fille du régiment continues at Royal Ballet And Opera until 24 July.
Photo credit: Tristram Kenton
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