Suck it and see: Powder Her Face premieres in the Netherlands

The Netherlands has two favourite occupations: one is to ‘do normal’, and the other is to do the opposite. In a country where nobody draws their curtains, you get to be an exhibitionist or a voyeur – or both, you decide! No wonder, then, that the national press have been salivating at the prospect of the long-awaited Dutch premiere of Thomas Adès’ Powder Her Face, an opera about a real-life scandal in which sex, fame, luxury and envy meet in a perennially irresistible cocktail.

Paul Carr’s production for Nederlandse Reisopera fully embraces Adès’ subversive cabaret aesthetic in this series of vignettes in the life of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll. The production is blessed with Dominique Wiesbauer’s lavish burlesque design which – like the original incriminating Polaroid – puts the Duchess’ pearls centre stage. An enormous oyster shell bed gasps open to accommodate Margaret and her lovers, and becomes – with the addition of an unimpeachable grey silk gown in the court scene – a dock of the Duchess’s own making. A series of black-and-white, moving close-ups of the Duchess’ face projected on the back wall are all of a piece with the Buñuel-like surrealism suggested by the original ‘headless man’ of tabloid legend and add to the sticky sense of claustrophobic voyeurism.

Appropriately perhaps, it’s the women who are most at home in this deviant world of sexual double-standards, whether it’s Laura Bohn as the Duchess asking for room service to “Bring me meat”, or Alison Scherzer – deliciously acute in all the right places – swinging from a giant pearl singing “Everything lovely, in aspic” like a kinky Eliza Doolittle. Both women have sung their roles before, Bohn for West Edge Opera and Scherzer for Nouvel Opéra Fribourg. Bohn’s rich, sensuous voice gives the Duchess authority, confidence and defiant self-belief while Scherzer is able to hit the Maid’s stratospheric register with a laser-like precision that would concern any stage-hand responsible for all those champagne glasses if it weren’t for her teasing lightness of touch.

Bitchy and insinuating (I mean that as a compliment) Daniel Arnaldos proves himself more than maître d’ material as the Electrician, and if John Savournin’s depths are vocally a little murky as the Duke, he redeems himself resonantly as the Judge, summing up with his bare buttocks on show. Oh, you chaps. 

The music is extraordinary, of course, and any number of national premieres can’t take the edge off Adès’ breathtaking invention. Although Philip Hensher’s arch libretto leaves any fellow feeling for the Duchess to the very end, the score is with her all the way. In what is possibly the most ambitious chamber opera ever composed, the music is a huge and glorious hotel, full of sumptuous rooms, in every one of which someone has laid waste to the minibar and left their underwear all over the floor at three in the afternoon. Nearly 30 years after the opera’s premiere, it’s wonderful to see Dutch audiences get a chance to peer agog into the pit to see just how on earth 15 musicians manage the riotous pastiche, the extremities of texture and timbre, the sheer audacity of this musical underworld. Dutch ensemble Phion (Orkest van Gelderland en Overijssel) might be very busy multi-tasking but, under the baton of the ebullient Otto Tausk, they’re having a ball.

In an opera famous for questionable liaisons there is, unfortunately, one such between the Northern European predilection for Making A Point and all things burlesque. This is an opera about sex, of course, but a duchess bringing herself to orgasm with a telephone as she waits for room service might tell us that quite succinctly without the distracting addition of lacy gimps writhing around her bathtub. Less is more, as they say in striptease, and it’s surprising how quickly lust can turn lacklustre when we have it spelled out for us. A clumsy moment with the houselights reminds us – in case we’d forgotten where we are – that we’re all guilty of enjoying the show. Well yes, we’ve bought the tickets.

Powder Her Face’ s queer eye on a society sex scandal is enjoying a timely tour around a country whose Bible belt turns out, since last year's election, to be a couple of notches tighter than anyone had quite bargained for. While audiences won’t blanche at bare bums or blow jobs in Amsterdam, let’s just wait and see how the Duchess goes down (gulp) in Zwolle.