La Bohème review – action rather than angst in lively revival

Royal Opera House, London
Richard Jones’s 2017 staging returns to Covent Garden with a young and light-hearted group of bohemians. In the pit Speranza Scappucci keeps things moving musically

Few operas plunge in so directly as La Bohème. One is immediately transported to Paris – or at least to Puccini’s version of it. The opening hits the spot in this revival of Covent Garden’s most frequently performed opera of all time, with the house’s principal guest conductor designate Speranza Scappucci setting a cracking tempo, and the bohemians playing it for laughs even when the love interest kicks in.

Richard Jones’s 2017 production, revived here by Ben Mills, keeps its distance from the score’s emotions. It focuses instead on getting the maximum action out of designer Stewart Laing’s striking settings. Snow falls throughout, to remind us this is Christmas. The first and last acts occur in what looks like a self-assembly rooftop garret, the second in a dazzlingly kaleidoscopic street and cafe scene (surely too bourgeois for the Latin Quarter in those Balzacian days), and the musically masterly third in a stark dark dawn setting, with only a small hut for cheer.

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