Last Monday marked the long-awaited return of Eva-Maria Westbroek to the stage of Dutch National Opera. The internationally-acclaimed soprano had not sung in Amsterdam, a few concert appearances excepted, since appearing as Minnie in a 2009 production of La fanciulla del West. Expectations were running high, especially because, by her own account, she is particularly fond of the role of Manon Lescaut. Those expectations were only partly met, not so much because of her performance itself, but more because of Andrea Breth’s distant and chilly direction, which left me dry-eyed.
Ms Breth’s staging starts with an interesting idea. Possibly to overcome the episodic character of Puccini’s first great success (the four acts are four disconnected moments in the life of the heroine), she stages the whole opera as flashbacks to Manon’s life, while she is dying, hallucinating, in the Louisiana desert. When the curtain rises on Act I, we see Manon and Des Grieux laying on the sand dunes on one side of the stage. In her delirium, the merry and youthful crowd in Amiens’ main square becomes a static mass of dark shadows that visually contradicts Puccini’s exuberant music.
It is an aesthetically handsome production with its bright-coloured costumes (by Eva Dessecker and the late Moidele Bickel) moving against the sets of white panels and sand dunes (with a few waiting room chairs thrown in for good measure) by Martin Zehetgruber, but it often feels irritably sterile. The characters in this nightmarish vision are left caricatured to the extreme. Manon’s brother, Lescaut, benefits from Thomas Oliemans’ agile stage presence but is simplistically pictured as a low-life gambling drunkard. Alain Coulombe’s Geronte de Revoir, Manon’s elderly protector, is the villain of a grotesque farce. Even Manon herself isn’t rescued from the paper-thin characterisation, portrayed as she is as a young gold-digger whose eyes only ignite at the sight of diamonds.