On the 13th of April, I went to see an opera rendition of Gustave Flaubert’s novel “Madame Bovary” at the Théatre National Wallonie-Bruxelles, as part of the La Monnaie opera program. It took elements from the plot and story of the book and changed their order and setting to create a structure for the opera like a sort of journey through time of a woman and her delusions. The singers were good, though I found the lead, Ana Naqe maybe a bit weak at first, but she made up for it throughout the piece with her phenomenal acting skills and ability to embody her character.
I honestly didn’t particularly love the composition of the piece, I felt it was a bit disjointed and maybe trying too hard to stand out as a contemporary piece, but the stage direction was very good – the primary element being a large conveyor belt that characters would periodically get on or off of creating very interesting movements between them and really added to the narrative. There were also a lot of meta aspects added to the opera, including a drawn out scene in which a character speaks directly to Flaubert, calling him out for the novel he wrote, which i found to be a nice breath of fresh air. The opera was directed by Debora Waldman, written by Michael De Cock and Harold Noben, the stage direction was done by Carme Portaceli and here is the cast list and the video streaming:
Leave a Reply