A new Bohème

Photo: Tristram Kenton

Dispensing with one of the best-loved and longest-lived productions in the history of the Royal Opera is a high-risk decision. Leaving it to your successor to deal with the fall-out could seem like extreme management cunning, but of course it’s basically a question of unfortunate timing. Given how far ahead plans have to be laid, the decision to replace John Copley’s La Bohème with a new one by Richard Jones was probably made way before Kasper Holten decided to move on from running Covent Garden. 

Happily for us, the new Bohème seems to be getting a good reception, with reviewers and opera-lovers finding many things to like. From within the show it’s difficult to get a sense of it as a whole: I have been able to watch bits of it on the show’s TV relay, but there’s no standing in the wings, as the show is totally open to the back wall and sides. Within the bleak and snowy void of the empty stage appear boxes of contained space in which the action takes place – the garret, shopping galleries and Café Momus (top). The busyness and colour of the consumerist world in Act 2 highlights the protagonists’ exclusion from it in the rest of the story and the garret space looks even bleaker the second time around.

Having been on stew-eating duties for the last five revivals of the previous production, I have been promoted to rubber-necking at the window in this one, which means that I have been captured for posterity by the Guardian photographer (left). It’s not often that an opera is deemed worthy of the centre spread in a national broadsheet, and that’s definitely worth drinking a toast to.