Turandot at the National Arts Centre:a Brilliant Staging Helped erase the Weak Stage presence of Calaf (Richard Margison).
Puccini’s opera about the cruel Chinese princess, who beheads her suitors to avenge herself on men for killing an ancestor, is based on Carlo Gozzi’s play Turandotte (1762) but actually the legend of Turandot has nothing to do with China. It was originally Persian. The composer died before the opera was first produced in 1926 , leaving unfinished fragments of music and libretti that had to be rewritten and reworked, (with the collaboration of the original conductor Toscanini) to capture the spirit of what the Maestro might have created himself if he had lived. Just to show that the genesis of this work is worthy of a Puccini opera itself.
The production by Opera Lyra currently playing in Southam Hall at the National Arts Centre is a sumptuous and magnificent spectacle, where the unidentified prince, known as Calaf, longs to possess the divine beauty of the frigid princess whose repressed sexuality (“No man will ever possess me!”) explodes into murderous acts of blood and torture as the excited crowds flow about her feet singing the emperor’s praises and waiting for the executioner’s axe to fall on the next unlucky suitor, proudly exhibited here as an almost Christ like Persian prince, a sacrificial victim in a white robe. In fact the whole axe grinding ritual in Act I with the appearance of the tattooed and muscle bound executioner became a heightened stage moment of pain and pleasure that director Brian Deedrick seemed to relish immensely, as it signalled the beginning of a superb piece of stage design that brought much of the strength to this production.