Lakmé review – finely sung but unambitious

Opera Holland Park, London
This faithful production of Delibes’s rarely staged 19th-century opera exposes weaknesses in his writing but is lifted by solid performances all round

Delibes’s Lakmé has notched more than 1,600 performances in Paris since its 1883 premiere, but it rarely crosses the Channel these days. That’s particularly odd, given the pop-classic status of the first act’s Flower Duet — best known as the music for the British Airways ad — and the enduring fame of the soprano’s Bell Song in the second act. Opera Holland Park deserves bags of credit for giving this elegantly crafted piece another UK airing, the company’s second in less than a decade.

Lakmé’s British Raj setting could easily lend itself to the kind of updated staging that is being visited in Rossini’s William Tell at Covent Garden. Instead, Holland Park’s new production is unambitiously content to take Lakmé on its own 19th-century orientalist terms. Many will find it a relief that the opera is not reimagined in post 9/11 Afghanistan, for instance. But the culture-clash love between the British officer Gérald and the Brahmin priest’s daughter, Lakmé, is so quaintly staged and kept in such relentlessly soft focus that the production is not just boring but in some respects offensive.

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