A strange sort of heroine

Abbe Prevost's Manon Lescaut is a strange sort of anti-heroine and it's hard to see what so attracted Massenet and Puccini to her - not to mention the German dissonance-meister Hans Werner Henze, whose Boulevard Solitude has a libretto closer to the rather seedy original than either of its two predecessors.

Capricious, avaricious and unfaithful, Manon has been seen by some as a precursor of more fully developed characters like Gustave Flaubert's Emma Bovary and, therefore, in some way, literature's first modern heroine.

Henze set the opening of his 1952 opera in a railway station just after WWII and perhaps this was the inspiration for Opera North's version of Puccini's opera by Daniel Slater, who also produced Massenet's Manon last year.

Here, he opens as a film is being shot on Amiens railway station, complete with cameras, extras, characters trying to memorise their lines and a film director dressed rather anachronistically in 1920s-style jodhpurs.

Perhaps he was inspired by Clouzot's 1949 film, which had Manon accused of collaborating with the nazis.

Indeed, he hammers this home rather heavily by projecting a silent film of Manon having her head shaved and branded with a swastika during the lush prelude to act three, when she's about to be carted off to Devil's Island. Many of those baying for her blood wear scarlet resistance armbands.

The filmic setting of the first act has been abandoned by now, until at the very end, when the film director reappears, silently observing Manon's death in her lover's arms in a desert dominated by two huge neoclassical facades, which have flanked the stage in every scene.

Is the director perhaps meant to represent God?

When Puccini wrote his opera in 1891, presumably he felt that the story was well enough known for him to be able to omit some of its critical parts, leaving holes which Slater has filled somewhat whimsically, often in ways which are as capricious as the wayward affections of his heroine.

As I've said many times of past Opera North productions, the music and the singing are at a very high level and Richard Farnes's conducting coaxes the full lusciousness of Puccini's scoring from his orchestra.

But even if we disregard the liberties that Slater has taken with the story, Natalia Dercho as Manon and Hugh Smith as des Grieux are both rather long in the tooth for the 18-year-old and her student lover that they are supposed to be portraying.

Opera North's determination to make us look afresh at the stories behind the works that they present should be congratulated, but the direction of both this one and Gluck's Orfeo obfuscate rather than illuminate their subjects.

Puccini's Manon Lescaut is at The Grand Leeds tomorrow and Friday, November 3 and 5, The Lowry, Salford Quays on October 19 and 21, Theatre Royal, Newcastle-upon-Tyne on October 13 and 14 and Theatre Royal, Nottingham on November 9 and 11.

KARL DALLAS