Pelléas et Mélisande at Aldeburgh Festival: a play of light and mystery

Light as the protagonist

At this summer's Aldeburgh Festival, the opening performance of Debussy's opera 'Pelléas et Mélisande' was presented as a semi-staging with minimal sets. Director Rory Kinnear, an actor and occasional opera director, together with lighting designers Paule Constable and Imogen Clarke, used light as the primary visual element, drawing on the references to shadow and luminosity in Maeterlinck's text.

There were no props or scenery apart from a few industrial-style pendant lights and a single high stool. The orchestra shared the platform with the singers, and characters stumbled through the musicians as if the instrumentalists were the forest surrounding the castle. Costumes, credited to Vicki Mortimer, were understated: dark suits for the royal men, tattered bridal white for Mélisande, and drab boiler suits for the silent onstage extras who also provided the brief offstage chorus.

Music and performance

Conducted by Ryan Wigglesworth, a featured artist of the festival, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra often sounded glorious, especially in the interludes. Yet the music, which can seem ethereal when emanating from an orchestra pit, here felt solid and earthy. The Snape acoustic gave warmth and immediacy to the voices: Nicolas Testé as Arkel, Sarah Connolly as Geneviève, Beth Stirling as Yniold, Gordon Bintner as Golaud, and Jacques Imbrailo as Pelléas. Sophie Bevan as Mélisande displayed a silvery, fluid soprano, but her character, gazing blankly into the audience, seemed more vacant than mysterious.

Overall, this intelligent semi-staging was ambitiously conceived and nearly succeeded, but Debussy's opera remains elusive.