Butterfly in-the-round is a feast for the eyes, less successful on the ears

I'll start with a confession:  I've never liked Madame Butterfly.

I can't bring myself to care about any of the characters.  Pinkerton is a craven, spineless oaf.  Butterfly is a misguided, irritating teenager without common sense or self-worth.  The most interesting character in the whole thing is the American consul, Sharpless, who sees a train wreck coming and tries to avert it … to no avail.  I'd like to see a rewrite with him as the main character.  Or, better yet, with Kate Pinkerton and Cio-Cio San coming to the sisterly understanding that Pinkerton's an ass, conspiring to kill him, and then vowing to work together to raise his son to be a decent human being who knows how to treat women.

I doubt Puccini considered either of those angles, and the operatic world has been satisfied with his original for more than a century.  It's packing the Royal Albert Hall at the moment for one of those "in the round" spectaculars from Raymond Gubbay productions.  Visually, it doesn't disappoint.

Cio-Cio San's house sits in the middle of a Japanese water garden, crossed by irregularly-spaced bridges.  Flowering wisteria and cherry blossoms in pots, lanterns, floating candles, wispy curtains, rock formations and a votive figures add to the atmosphere.  The costumes are lushly traditional, with the women in a spectacular parade of floral silk kimono.  For the second half, the water drains to better reveal the precison-raked gravel and stones of a harsher Zen garden, which is supposed to reflect the dwindling of Cio-Cio San's money and hopes.  I confess I didn't get this until I read it in the programme.  Having read about a malfunction of the waterworks and ensuing flooding early in the run, I mistakenly thought the waterless second act was a technical issue.

With water or without, it's a beautiful production to look at.  Puccini's music … especially in the second half … is lovely, and the orchestra delivered it well.  But the acoustics in the Royal Albert Hall aren't very good, and opera "in-the-round" is challenging at the best of times.  No matter how good the singer, wherever he's projecting his voice, it's not at two-thirds of the audience.  Translating the libretto into English without providing surtitles exacerbated the problem.  I caught a few words out of every hundred, the odd word or phrase coming through in every minute or two of singing.

This means that you lose all of the subtlety of plot, and are left with only the broad-brush overview in the programme.  Worse, you're straining so hard to make out the words that the fight for comprehension overtakes the ability to appreciate the music.  (Only the singers who delivered Sharpless and Goro had the tone and clarity to overcome this trap.)  It was only after I abandoned any attempt to figure out what they were singing, and just accepted the unintelligible voices as a part of the music, that I enjoyed it more.

This, in general, is why I hate opera translated into English.  Keep it in its native language, let me read a translation, and free me from the effort of trying to figure out what's going on.

I was deeply disappointed, because the lavish traditional sets I like are rare these days.  The big opera houses aren't taken seriously unless they put on modern, revisionist interpretations, and the smaller companies generally can't afford them.  Last night's set and costumes on the Royal Opera House stage would have delighted me.  In the echoing cavern of the Albert Hall, it left me wondering seriously if we'd wasted our money.

Certainly, the pre-theatre dinner was as enjoyable as the opera itself … which isn't necessarily a good thing.

We booked in to the Elgar Restaurant, which occupies a big, high-ceilinged space with vast windows on the third floor of the pavilion that juts out from the west side of the hall.   It's musically themed, of course, with a bright red piano on a dais in the centre of the room and big photos of stars who've performed there in the past on the walls.  There's a pleasant, wide-ranging menu I'd categorise as modern posh gastro-pub, starting with a fun cocktail menu of options named after famous tunes.  They're proud of their wood-fired grill and promote it heavily for the mains.

We both started with fish: both my swordfish carpaccio and Piers' home-cured salmon were excellent.  Our shared chateaubriand was OK, but didn't live up to the expectations raised by the waitress' enthusiastic description of the grill.  Bearnaise sauce with a touch too much vinegar didn't help, though the course was elevated by a smashing Malbec and some perfectly cooked green and snow peas that were springtime in a bowl.  Booking here gives you the table for the interval, so we ordered pudding and coffee to have at the break.  Fortunately our seats were on that side of the hall, which is an important consideration when booking here.  Between a relatively short interval and a very big hall, you lose much of your dessert time in transit.

As with any of these in-venue restaurants, you're paying about 20% over the odds for the convenience of location.  At the Royal Albert Hall, where there's a dearth of restaurants in the immediate area, there aren't a lot of other choices.  The meal rounds out a pleasant evening but significantly increases the overall bill.  Especially if you're drinking.  They do at least give you plastic cups into which you can transfer your wine to take back to your seat … a homely touch you won't find at the more formal Royal Opera House.

Bottom line:  I would have given up my go cup for surtitles and better acoustics.  But, failing that, the portable Malbec made the second half more enjoyable.