David Le Page
opera
Keep your eyes closed, and you’re quite safe attending the Sasol-sponsored Pro Musica production of Verdi’s La Traviata at Johannesburg’s Civic Theatre.
Effortlessly led by the voices of Elizabeth Frandsen as Violetta and Jannie Moolman as Alfredo, and the baton of Weiss Doubell, the production is musically very sound. Baritone Denver Smith is excellent as Giorgio Germont, the father of Alfredo; Eric Visser brings a lurking, bat-like presence to the character of Baron Douphol, Alfredo’s imagined nemesis.
The aesthetics, however, do not match the music. Physical sets have been traded for a slide show projected on a translucent screen behind which lurks the choir.
Inexplicably, the choir is required to lurk even when the narrative calls for a party, as in the opening scene. And the slides are largely irrelevant; images of baroque and rococo sculpture and mouldings, occasionally interspersed with saccharine images of nature that appear to have been scanned from a catalogue of 1970s-style greeting cards. Every now and then, these images do suggest the opulence of a salon or the poor taste of the aristocracy. But they are at once too random to suggest realism and too specific to dissolve into abstraction. Shifts from collages of mounted angels to double-storey profiles of male busts and European meadows appear to be largely arbitrary.
La Traviata is a colourful tale, but the inherent drama of the opera is badly neglected by this production. Violetta is a courtesan who falls in love with a young admirer, Alfredo. But their association, Alfredo’s father tells her, is ruining his daughter’s chances of marriage. Nobly, she tells Alfredo she loves someone else in order to chase him away. In a final scene, the two are reconciled just before she dies, rather energetically, of tuberculosis.
Sadly, the production never gives dramatic flesh to this story, based on a play by Alexandre Dumas.
Apart from the fact that she appears to have been cursed with a pair of brocade water wings by the State Theatre costumiers, we are given few visual clues in the opening scenes to Violetta’s character as a “painted courtesan”. She does, though, cling to a champagne bottle with rather more enthusiasm than might have a more genteel lady of the era. While it is something of a relief that the relationship with the bottle is not consummated, such consummation might have helped finally persuade us that she is indeed of the demi-monde.
Only in act three, as Violetta mopes on her sickbed, do the incongruities between the opera’s tale and this rather subdued incarnation subside, as Violetta passes away enthusiastically pummelling her futon.
Those who worry that they might find three hours of Verdi rather intense, need not. For light relief, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera fills the loos with plangent notes during the two intervals.
La Traviata shows at Johannesburg’s Civic Theatre on March 23, 25 and 28. The role of Violetta will be played by Anina Wasserman. Tel: (011) 403?3408