It’s hard to imagine that it’s only been 130 years since Puccini first premiered La Boheme. Nowadays, it’s a revered classic, and guaranteed to be on any opera company's annual programme if it needs to stay afloat. It’s a crowd pleaser with its melodrama of poor, impoverished artists loving, starving and dying in Paris. But Puccini’s La Boheme had a less auspicious beginning, with one of his contemporaries accusing him of stealing his idea and being poorly received on its first outing. And that’s at the heart of That Bastard Puccini! Currently playing at
Park Theatre, writer James Inverne uses the friendship and rivalry between the two composers, Puccini and Ruggero Leoncavallo, to weave a comic tale of creative frustration with an awful lot of facts and tidbits about the opera scene at the time. It’s part comedy, part music appreciation.
It opens with Leoncavallo (Alasdair Buchan) at home with his wife Berthe (Lisa-Anne Wood), cursing about Puccini’s latest work, which is drawn from the same source material, Scénes de la vie de bohéme by Henri Murger, that he intends to use for his next opera. Leoncavallo had had runaway success with his opera, Pagliacci. Pagliacci is an opera about a jealous clown who proceeds to tell his beautiful wife that if he ever catches her cheating on him, he will kill her and her lover. And then he does. Leoncavallo appears to be equally short of a fuse here and accuses Puccini of stealing his idea. Puccini, portrayed here by Sebastian Torkia, is a bit of a disreputable type of man, with his multiple affairs and fabulously conniving nature. However, given that he is a genius, you feel an affinity for him, especially with his desire to drive creativity through competition.
And rather than being the absent man in Leoncavallo’s home's drawing room, Puccini is front and centre, playing off the other two characters. It’s a clever device that allows for the dissemination of a wealth of facts and the portrayal of multiple roles, which is a source of much of the comedy.
The thing about much of the drama and facts thrown at the audience is that they are all true. The comic timing between the three leads makes for an enjoyable evening. If there’s one reservation, you don’t get a sense of the importance of opera in Italy at the time. Lisa-Anne Wood performs some of the arias from both operas. Despite the set design featuring a piano and a manuscript projected on the floor, you don’t get much sense of the musicality that should exist among these characters.
Still, it’s a fascinating insight into the motivations and drive behind creative minds and the lengths they can go to. Directed by Daniel Slater, That Bastard Puccini! is at Park Theatre until 9 August.
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Photo credits: David Monteith-Hodge
