16-07-2025
That Bastard, Puccini! review — music, mischief and silky wit
You can't sit through James Inverne's engagingly dotty chamber play about operatic rivalry without thinking of Amadeus. Here we are, back on the faultline that separates talent from genius, this time with Leoncavallo and Puccini competing to see who can write the better version of La bohème.
What makes this nimble production at the Park Theatre in London so seductive is that the tale of ambition and skulduggery is drenched in cleverly weighted meta asides. Inverne, a former editor of Gramophone whose debut play, A Walk with Mr Heifetz, ran off-Broadway in 2018, wraps his research in layers of humour and self-referential nods and winks.
And at the heart of it all is a winningly mischievous performance by Sebastien Torkia as a Puccini who is a suave wheeler-dealer and womaniser. It's not so long since I saw Torkia bring an ever-grinning facsimile of Silvio Berlusconi to life in a bio-musical of that corrupt old rogue. This year he played both Professor Van Helsing and a simpering Mina Harker in the rumbustious vampire farce Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors. He is a silky comic force.
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We first see his boulevardier eavesdropping on poor Leoncavallo (Alasdair Buchan) and his ever-supportive wife, Berthe (Lisa-Anne Wood). Dogged by fears that he is destined to be a one-hit wonder, the composer of Pagliacci is outraged that the man he thinks of as a friend is muscling in on his plans to bring Henri Murger's stories of wayward Parisian bohos to the stage.
Puccini denies stealing the idea, of course, and as their feud bubbles away, he feels free to lecture his rival on the meaning of creativity. Inverne allows his characters to catch each other using language drawn from the psychobabble of our own day. Buchan's mournful, dishevelled Leoncavallo always wins our sympathy, and there are even moments when he seems close to grabbing the glory at Venice's La Fenice. Wood is kept busy too, singing the occasional aria, transforming herself into Puccini's formidable wife, Elvira, and even joining Gorka in delivering a hilarious impersonation of a pernicketty Gustav Mahler who, as Vienna's leading conductor, wields godlike power over the two Italians.
Could the sewing up of loose ends in the final 20 minutes have been tighter? Perhaps. Still, the director Daniel Slater, a familiar face on the opera circuit, administers it all with a light touch. Carly Brownbridge's handsome set smuggles musical notation onto the floor. In this quirky realm, a chaise longue can become a gondola.★★★★☆120minPark Theatre, London, to Aug 9, @timesculture to read the latest reviews
