Longborough's La Boheme's a lot better than it needs to be

This summer, with the Longborough Opera Festival taking on the promethean task of putting on Wagner's full Ring Cycle, they could be forgiven for not doing anything else.  Or, when doing a Ring alternative, to give it shorter shrift than the Wagnerian climax.  Happily, this wasn't so.

The operatic production is, admittedly, only one part of a delightful weekend.  The whole experience of donning formal wear, quaffing champagne in an English garden and staying in a Cotswold manor house (as usual, the spectacular Windy Ridge) with your friends would compensate for an average performance.  It's provided the buffer I needed to ease into Wagner in previous years.  This year's La Boheme was a triumph even though it didn't have to be.   Like so much of what Longborough does, this was a production that made you forget you were in a converted barn some rich guy's garden.  Small production, big quality.  That intimacy, in fact, gave me an appreciation for the characters and the plot I hadn't had before.

I've never denied the magic of Puccini's score.  The duet over which our lead characters fall in love, O Soave Fanciulla, is so poignantly exquisite a romantic soundtrack it makes love at first sight perfectly credible.  And since great music combines with a fairly simple plot and a relatively short running time, it's one of the most approachable operas in the standard canon.

But I've always found Mimi a weak and uninteresting lead, and have never been particularly gripped by the whole Parisian starving artist thing.  Perhaps it's the small "c" conservative in me, thinking "get a job so you can heat the damned apartment.  Paint in your spare time."

The Longborough troop gelled as a group of friends and radiated the frustrated energy of young artists rebelling against society.  (In fact, it made me wonder why nobody's ever done a pre-Raphaelite adaptation, to play on the drama and sexual dynamics of that group.)  Grant Doyle brought Marcello, the painter who is the secondary lead, brilliantly to life.  Joined by Fiona Murphy's sparkling Musetta, they combined to portray one of those couples who can't live without each other yet fight constantly, all wrong, but drawn together by compelling sexuality.  This production was as much their story as the traditional leads, and at the end you left believing that the tragedy that unfolded on stage would make them appreciate each other and bond for life.

Katie Bird's Mimi revealed more backbone than others I've seen.  Early coughs and stumbles hinted that she was ill even when she met our hero Rodolfo (Robyn Lyn Evans), and was focused on sucking the marrow out of her short life.  The couple matched their excellent voices with strong acting, conjuring a palpable sexual frisson that made them not an innocent young couple, but two equally daring and rebellious free spirits who hooked up quickly through passion and then discovered love.  But Rodolfo's jealousy causes Mimi to walk, and she's actually moved on to another relationship in Act 2 as he realises his mistake letting her go.  Realising that she's coming back to the toxic relationship she knew was no good for her, but she still wanted, makes that death scene more tragic.

The transposition to post-war Paris might have helped to bring out these sexual dynamics; it certainly

made all the relationships seem more modern.  It also allowed for attractive Chanel-style costumes for the women, and let the men evoke Picasso.  The two story set oddly set the famous garret in a basement, but it made great use of space and allowed for credible crowd scenes on a small stage.

Four of us purchased one of the boxes mid-way along the left side of the theatre and booked dinner in the carriage house restaurant.  This was a marvellously relaxed and sophisticated way to go.  The boxes are comfortable and offer plenty of legroom, while the restaurant was good quality and easier than the picnic routine.  (Which is sometimes fun, but we weren't in the mood.)  Too late, we realised that because the box was exclusively ours and opens directly to the outside, we could have brought in drinks.  Next year.