Nixon in Paris

Grand-scale staging of operas by Adams and Ambroise Thomas at the Bastille

Welcome banquet: (left to right) Joshua Bloom (Kissinger), Kathleen Kim (Chiang-Ch’ing), John Matthew Myers (Mao), Xioameng Zhang (Chou), Thomas Hampson (Nixon), Renée Fleming (Pat) Picture by Christophe Pelé

Carlos Ott’s Opéra-Bastille, opened in 1989, has never figured among my favourite theatres: with a capacity of 2,900, it is too large for most of the classical and romantic repertory, and both singer- and audience-unfriendly to boot. Yet no-one can deny that the iconic building has been a spectacular public success, hugely popular, and nearly always full, even in a city where at least three other theatres regularly offer opera as part of their programme. François Mitterrand’s decision to put a newly built “people’s opera” at the heart of his 1981 election manifesto has been thoroughly vindicated. Paris is now an “opera-mad” city enjoying millions of subsidies that puts the UK’s discredited Arts Council funding into doleful perspective, proving that government investment yields rich dividends. And opera in Paris is not exactly cheap. Even in such a large theatre, ticket prices are only a fraction lower than those at London’s 2,150-seat Royal Opera House.

My most recent visit to Paris was to see two new stagings: of Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet, a local specialité but not of this maison where this lightly perfumed adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy struggled to make its effect in a Regietheater (direction of actors) extravaganza by the ubiquitous-in-Europe Pole, Krzysztof Warlikowski, and his regular set and costume designer, Malgorzata Szczęśniak. On the other hand, John Adams’s 1987 docu-opera, Nixon in China, enjoyed its most spectacular and dramatically stimulating inscenation to date in the hands of Valentina Carrasco, a participant since 2000 in the Catalan theatre collective La Fura dels Baus, but for the past three years working independently as a director. This was her Opéra debut, a triumphant one. My previous experience of Fura productions - including a complete Ring cycle in Valencia - has been decidedly mixed. Admiration for the company’s upmarket Cirque-du-Soleil visuals has been tempered by disappointment at the notable lack of psychological insights in the direction of actors: the work of her erstwhile collaborators, Carlus Padrissa and Alex Ollé, often looks like Regietheater without any Regie.