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Colourful Treatment
French comedies launch the Buxton Festival,
reviewed by MIKE WHEELER
After last year's Sibelius/Rimsky-Korsakov double bill, Buxton has come up with a pair of French comedies to launch the 2013 Festival (Buxton Opera House, Buxton, UK, 5 July 2013).
Saint-Saëns' La Princesse Jaune is a one-act, two-hander trading on the vogue for Japanese culture current in France at the time, with echoes of the Pygmalion story. Kornélis is a painter obsessed with his picture of a Japanese woman in a yellow kimono, to the despair of his cousin, Léna, who is secretly in love with him. In a drug-induced hallucination (almost the first thing we see when the curtain goes up is a large poster for absinthe) he imagines himself in Japan, pouring out his love to the woman in the portrait...
Copyright © 11 July 2013
Mike Wheeler,
Derby UK
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