La bohème, Scottish Opera, review: tuberculosis-scarred bohemians in a car park – perfect for a pandemic

Scottish Opera could have been forgiven for choosing a jaunty and uplifting work for its first show of the Covid era. Instead, it has bravely and boldly opted for Puccini’s painfully relevant 1896 opera La bohème. The piece, in which the lives of young, impoverished Parisian artists are scarred by tuberculosis, is performed, in director Roxana Haines’s innovative production, in modern dress and in the open air – under a canopy in Scottish Opera’s car park.

In the interests of the comfort of the socially distanced, mask-wearing audience, John Dove’s version of Puccini’s score runs to a little over an hour and a half, without an interval. The libretto, which is in English, is an impressively crisp, occasionally audacious translation by Amanda Holden. It is performed by a fabulous group of warrior singers who face the elements with the courage of a band of medieval troubadours.

The orchestra, protected from the elements, play out of our view from inside the Scottish Opera studios, under the baton of Stuart Stratford, the sound amplified by speakers in the outdoor auditorium. The set is comprised, inauspiciously, of two haulage wagons and a platform covered in what Donald Trump might call “fake grass”. In fact, this rough-and-readiness befits the artisanal defiance of the production. Indeed, in the immensely capable hands of designer Anna Orton, the opera’s impecunious Bohemians look like the denizens of Bruce Robinson’s iconic film Withnail and I, updated for our virus-ravaged times.

On the opening evening (every performance begins at 5pm), the Scottish weather, inevitably, transformed the makeshift theatre into something of a wind tunnel. All the better, it seemed, for Samuel Sakker’s struggling writer Rodolfo and Elizabeth Llewellyn’s consumptive costume maker Mimì to pursue their tortured love affair, under the shadow of the latter’s advancing illness.

One suspects that the audience would, if operatic etiquette had allowed, have been on its feet as Sakker and Llewellyn delivered the two great arias and the magnificent duet with which Puccini ends act one. The Australian tenor delivers Rodolfo’s song with a shuddering pathos, while Llewellyn, who made her name playing Mimì for English National Opera 10 years ago, sings with equal passion.

This opera has always had moments of light relief, but Haines raises these to another level. Rhian Lois, playing the singer Musetta, and Francis Church, as the wealthy Alcindoro, perform their roles with, respectively, an attitude and an absurdity that give the piece an unusually comic dimension. The cast is excellent to an individual, with Roland Wood outstanding as the painter Marcello. The truncated score itself is delivered with a swirling, undiminished beauty, despite the strange circumstances.

Little wonder, therefore, that by the end of this bold La bohème, the weather-beaten audience was cheering this production to its temporary rafters.

Until September 13; scottishopera.org.uk