La Traviata is based around the wonderful fallacy that a woman can hold a powerful soprano performance whilst simultaneously dying of tuberculosis. Being skint, I bought the cheapie tickets that cost less than the interval drink, which meant I was so far back that Violetta’s main visual identifiers were a gaudy dress and a magnificent bosom. When she changed into less revealing outfits I would become momentarily lost until she opened her mouth. At anything less melodramatic than opera, the inability to discern actors’ faces could have been an impairment to the experience. Here, I found, it didn’t really matter too much. Opera doesn’t appear to be subtle.
From the moment you realised that the floor was inscribed with Violetta’s tombstone writ large so that, right from the beginning she was, quite literally, dancing on her own grave, the plot drove towards her love affair, betrayal and death with such grim determination that the only real surprise was the means by which she would get there. When Alfredo’s father announced the presence of a hitherto-unmentioned daughter, whose marriage was threatened by her brother’s association with Violetta, I rather shared in her scandalised exclamation, ‘two children!’ (obviously, this is the subtitled version – I don’t understand spoken Italian, let alone sung), the sense of frustration that such a clunky plot device had been wheeled in to prevent her happiness. Nonetheless, the opening party scenes instilled enough of a desire to drink in me that I had to shoot off to the bar to by a miniature plastic bottle of red wine at the first sniff of an interval. My friend actually attempted to get one at something which turned out not to be an interval after all, but merely a prolonged scene change. Unfortunately, as Violetta’s hard-drinking life had caught up with her, the wine became increasingly hard to swallow.
It’s pretty much guaranteed that I’ll cry at any production in which lovers are separated, the only thing being more certain is that I will watch any scary movie from behind the sofa whilst resolutely staring at a space of wall half a foot away from the television screen whilst trying to pretend I’m somewhere else. At this, I cried three times, which is quite a hit rate. My friend cried so much she had to go to the toilet and restock on tissue and came out looking rather like an Impressionist painting of herself. A resounding success, if one were to measure success in bucket loads of tears.
The opulent Rococo scenery was great, helped by the luxuriousness of the Hippodrome, which was clearly designed with lavish productions in mind. For Brecht or Pinter or any kind of stinging social realism, the realisation that you were sitting in something that resembled a red Baroque wedding cake might have felt a bit clanging. As the Hippodrome specialises in Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals and Strictly Come Dancing, this is hardly a problem. Costumes were fab:, lots of velvet, flounces and cleavage. The singing was good too, as far as I could judge. Shortest 2 ¾ hours I’ve ever spent in a theatre
From the moment you realised that the floor was inscribed with Violetta’s tombstone writ large so that, right from the beginning she was, quite literally, dancing on her own grave, the plot drove towards her love affair, betrayal and death with such grim determination that the only real surprise was the means by which she would get there. When Alfredo’s father announced the presence of a hitherto-unmentioned daughter, whose marriage was threatened by her brother’s association with Violetta, I rather shared in her scandalised exclamation, ‘two children!’ (obviously, this is the subtitled version – I don’t understand spoken Italian, let alone sung), the sense of frustration that such a clunky plot device had been wheeled in to prevent her happiness. Nonetheless, the opening party scenes instilled enough of a desire to drink in me that I had to shoot off to the bar to by a miniature plastic bottle of red wine at the first sniff of an interval. My friend actually attempted to get one at something which turned out not to be an interval after all, but merely a prolonged scene change. Unfortunately, as Violetta’s hard-drinking life had caught up with her, the wine became increasingly hard to swallow.
It’s pretty much guaranteed that I’ll cry at any production in which lovers are separated, the only thing being more certain is that I will watch any scary movie from behind the sofa whilst resolutely staring at a space of wall half a foot away from the television screen whilst trying to pretend I’m somewhere else. At this, I cried three times, which is quite a hit rate. My friend cried so much she had to go to the toilet and restock on tissue and came out looking rather like an Impressionist painting of herself. A resounding success, if one were to measure success in bucket loads of tears.
The opulent Rococo scenery was great, helped by the luxuriousness of the Hippodrome, which was clearly designed with lavish productions in mind. For Brecht or Pinter or any kind of stinging social realism, the realisation that you were sitting in something that resembled a red Baroque wedding cake might have felt a bit clanging. As the Hippodrome specialises in Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals and Strictly Come Dancing, this is hardly a problem. Costumes were fab:, lots of velvet, flounces and cleavage. The singing was good too, as far as I could judge. Shortest 2 ¾ hours I’ve ever spent in a theatre
Go to http://www.wno.org.uk/ for details on both operas.
The Welsh National Opera will be at Bristol Hippodrome until the 21st November and will move to The Mayflower, Southampton, on the 25th. Go to bristolhippodrome.org.uk, or http://www.mayflower.org.uk/.
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