Madama Butterfly, Grange Park Opera, review: surprisingly lethargic and directionless

Telegraph

08-06-2025

For its first new production of the season, Grange Park Opera has chosen Puccini's ever-popular but problematical Madama Butterfly. John Doyle's penny-plain staging in his own designs tells straightforwardly the story of the young Japanese girl Cio-Cio-San (Madam Butterfly), used and then betrayed by Pinkerton, the visiting American navy lieutenant. It provides a worthy frame for South Korean soprano Hye-Youn Lee's searing portrayal of the title role. But too much of the rest is surprisingly lethargic and directionless.
It is becoming difficult these days to take Puccini 's drama on the tragic terms he envisaged it, as the figure of Butterfly, exploited and naïve, feels ever more uncomfortable as an operatic heroine today. But no cultural doubts cloud Doyle's narrative, set on an open stage with just three ornamental chests with roller blinds that rise and fall somewhat aimlessly behind them. (There are not even the necessary doors: visitors have to knock on the chests.) The affable Pinkerton, a rather strained tenor Luis Gomes, is not brutal here, as he leaves promising to return, just overtaken by convention and weakness.
No-one today would expect a Butterfly of 15, the age clearly specified in the text – many more mature sopranos have sung the role, and the vocal demands of the part are tremendous. Hye-Youn Lee meets them ardently, totally, perhaps missing the innocence of the earlier scenes, but flowering with passion in her love duet with Pinkerton at the end of act one, and then with self-deluding hope in her aria Un bel di, trusting in Pinkerton's return. This is an international-level portrayal of the role.
Butterfly's maid Suzuki, finely portrayed with awkward, strenuous devotion by Kitty Whately, senses from the beginning that disaster is in the air as Butterfly and Pinkerton get together. She hovers over the scene and attempts to mediate the denouement when Pinkerton arrives back in town with his new American wife (the sharply-etched Rosa Sparks). The hapless US consul Sharpless (Ross Ramgobin) is not much help, though he attempts to warn Butterfly, while the interfering Goro (the veteran Adrian Thompson) and Cio-Cio-San's uncle Bonze (Jihoon Kim) here seem irrelevant to the central narrative.
This opera went through several rewrites on the way to its current form, and the excision of a scene in the local Consulate in Act Two made for a lengthy final act entirely dominated by Butterfly herself. The atmospheric 'humming chorus' and long orchestral interlude of the night watch, as Butterfly waits for Pinkerton's return, is exquisitely scored, but here absolutely nothing happens. This might work were the music more firmly driven, but while the playing of the Gascoigne Orchestra is just about adequate, there is no momentum.
Conductor Stephen Barlow gives his singers plenty of time to breathe and phrase, and thus provides support, yet there is a fatal lack of impetus in the forward movement of the score, its evocation of Japanese music under-characterised. The orchestral playing is one area where Grange Park Opera, now facing its biggest challenge with a forthcoming Wagner Ring cycle starting next year, needs attention.