Everything about the opening scene of this production set me on edge: centre-stage a hybrid bed on wheels, part crib part hospital, and propped up on it, peering through the bars, a young female, presumably Lucia. The set is a high-walled room, dingy white, plaster stained, paper peeling, with a short door and elongated windows suggesting a surreal Alice-in-Wonderland distortion. When Victorian gentlemen start coming in through the windows, you know you are in a work of the imagination, where passions will push the protagonists over the edge of pretended sanity into their underlying madness. I must admit resisting some of David Alden’s more barking ideas like Enrico playing with his sister Lucia’s doll, then groping her, then dressing her like a doll for her wedding. But resistance proved futile. Donizetti’s glorious bel canto score, attentively conducted by Stephen Lord for a cast of impeccable voices led by Anna Christy, sucessfully edged Lucia’s dark night into the radiant and happy realm of high art.
The drift of this 2008 David Alden production, debuting somewhat redesigned at the COC in Toronto, though well-known, deserves refreshing. Alden has shifted the setting from late 1600s to Victorian times in order to engage more available patriarchal stereotypes, blatantly emphasized by ubiquitous photographs of male ancestors. The predominantly black and grey tones of sets (Charles Edwards) and costumes (Brigitte Reiffenstuel) suggest that bloodless lack of vitality is one thing the warring families have in common. Lucia before her wedding is costumed and directed to behave like a child in a nursery. Her brother Enrico (baritone Brian Mulligan) is directed to show beneath unscrupulous, sadomasochistic brother behaviour, some seriously twisted, incestuous and paedophilic inclinations. The cold, dim lighting (Adam Silverman, redesigned by Andrew Cutbush) starkly contrasts with the warm, rich music, and cuts its own edge, casting on the bare walls long eloquent finger shadows, the language of lonely children. Lucia’s victimization is communicated variously by having her tied to the bedposts, propped by her brother with her arms extended like a crucified puppet, or arranged on the wedding-feast dining-table like a sacrificial offering. I usually prefer subtle to crude, but in this case, Alden’s crude is so over-the-top outrageous, that I allowed the pleasure of it to edge in, and that is a good feeling.
If I reflect on other operas that employ harsh music to express the torment of outraged women, say Strauss’ Elektra, it is a wonder how the lyric beauty of Donizetti’s score works here. But it does. It is the spoonful of sugar that makes the bitterness go down; it cures despair even where the libretto offers no ray of hope saving the thought that everyone is better off among the angels in some mythical heaven than they were here on earth.