Opera
Falstaff (Welsh National Opera, Cardiff)
Simple perfection
Rodney Milnes
Reacting to the new WNO Falstaff — which is one of the most profoundly satisfying opera productions I have seen for many a year — it would be tempting to write that Peter Stein is a genius beside whom all other directors are but puling Pygmies. But it is not quite as easy as that. Stein is a very good director indeed, but there are others — some of them are ours and work here, and there are many in Europe and America. What sets Stein aside is his obstinacy, an obstinacy that means he will only take on a production if he is guaranteed the amount of rehearsal he believes he needs — about twice as much as most other directors require or are given. We are lucky that there is one operatic organisation in this country able to accommodate him. There is also an integrity and seriousness about the man that means he only does one new produc- tion a year (compare and contrast): thank heavens he can afford it is all one can say.
So what marks this Falstaff out from so many other opera productions is the cer- tainty that what you are witnessing is the result of a year or more's concentrated thought on the part of the director, and around two months of equally concen- trated work on the part of the conductor, cast, orchestra, stage staff, etc. Whatever happens on stage, in broad outline or tiny detail, happens because all other ways of doing it have been tried, weighed and rejected. A vast corpus of communal en- deavour has been gradually fined down into an object of simple, clear perfection.
This Falstaff is also a traditional, repre- sentational production; it is set neither in a slaughterhouse nor on a motorway, and meat-hooks and machine-guns are conspi- cuous by their absence. Which is not to say that one has suddenly developed a fashion- able aversion to such interesting aids to the appreciation of opera, rather that it is good to be reminded that the traditional produc- tion has life in it yet (Peter Hall has been trying to remind us for years). Nor is the form enlivened by the application of spe- cial insights: the overwhelming impression of the performance is that everything is precisely as it ought to be. Everything is right. The class structure is right: this Falstaff is beyond any shadow of doubt a gentleman, and that simple fact motivates his actions and reactions; Ford is not, yet neither is he a boor or a half-wit, and his reactions are caused by his incomprehen- sion at the ways of people he has been conditioned to believe are his betters (it always comes as a shock, doesn't it?). Nannetta as an alarmingly nubile little girl is right (I loved her throwing childish tantrums in the drawing-room and no one taking a blind bit of notice of her) and Fenton as a sharp little number with designer stubble and snazzy silk stockings is right — why should he always be played as a wimp? The wives are right: straightfor- ward, bored and rather flattered. Above all, Bardolph and Pistol are right: after the Glyndebourne production (conspicuously less well cast, incidentally, than this one) I thought them the two most impossible of all operatic characters, but here they are, two perfectly ordinary, utterly credible, very funny human beings faultlessly por- trayed by John Harris and Geoffrey Moses. And why does Quickly have to be a couthie old lady? She has a chequered
past, and Cynthia Buchan's portrayal as a very physical, semi-retired slag seemed right enough to me.
But the performance revolves around Donald Maxwell's hugely lovable Falstaff, lovable because of and despite everything: elegant, courtly, regal, dignified, always old, always fat in the way he walks, stands and sits. The fact that Mr Maxwell is young and thin redoubles one's admiration for the concentrated thought and the work that have gone into his impersonation. And the fact that he also sang Iago in Stein's WNO Otello (the roles were created for the same baritone) strengthens the link between the two works forged by Richard Armstrong in the pit: his is not a filigree Falstaff, but one in which the phrases are really played through for all their full, warm worth, in which violence lurks beneath the surface, whether in the chastisement of Falstaff or in a Jealousy Monologue worthy of Iago and Otello rolled into one — and quite magnificently sung by David Malis.
There is also a bewildering variety of nuance and imaginative suppleness of phrase in Mr Maxwell's singing; Alice suits Suzanne Murphy well — she has the fullness of tone and the necessary agility; Nuccia Focile and Laurence Dale are strong rather than just sweet as the young lovers (their enthusiastic snogging is almost embarrassing). The closing moments are quite magical. After a staging of the Fugue that must in itself have taken half the rehearsal period to create, Falstaff frees himself from the milling throng and floats heavenwards in the attitude of a hideously overweight cherub, grinning benignly and giving epicene little Queen Mother waves. Pure poetry!
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