La Bohème - Puccini
2001

Staatsoper Unter Den Linden, Berlin

CONDUCTOR
Philippe Jordan
DIRECTOR
Lindy Hume
SET DESIGN
Dan Potra
COSTUME DESIGN
Carl Friedrich Oberle/Vicki Feitscher (original costumes)
LIGHTING DESIGN
Franz Peter David
DRAMATURGY
Ilka Seifert
PRINCIPAL ARTISTS
Including:
Zvetelina Vassileva, Daniela Bruera, Miroslav Dvorsky, Roman Trekel, Hanno Müller-Brachmann, Kwangchul Youn, Peter-Jürgen Schmidt, Gerd Wolf, Bernd Zettisch and Bernd Riedel.

To my complete astonishment this uncontroversial production is still performed and incredibly popular in Berlin 25 years later. It was a huge deal for me to direct at such a prestigious opera house in this amazing and historic city, and to walk through the snow to work on this opera each day. To this day I wear the silver ring engraved with the word TRAUM (dream) that I bought in Berlin to celebrate its opening night. It was a great privilege to work with costume designer Carl Friedrich Oberle and the extraordinary conductor Philippe Jordan, and to collaborate with my friend and colleague, designer Dan Potra, who is like a brother to me. Dan and I have created dozens of shows together over several decades. Working with him is always a roller coaster ride of absolute joy interspersed with moments of terror, but we’ve made many iconic productions together in opera houses large and small around the world and have had many incredible adventures together. We were delighted to return to revive our Bohème in the Staatsoper’s temporary home in the Schiller Theatre in 2012, and to find it in pretty good shape. Dozens of spectacular casts have performed in this production, too many to list here.

If the destinies of Rodolfo and his friends go to our hearts deeper than usual in this new production, it is mainly thanks to the Australian director Lindy Hume. Her work is modern in the best sense of the term, in many respects surprising, refreshingly unconventional and nevertheless always true to the spirit of Puccini’s opera. Maybe she should be even more pleased with the silence that overcame the audience, breaking only moments later into the final applause, than the bravos that followed.

Das Opernglas, February 2002

"Director Lindy Hume brings into sharp focus the more disturbing aspects of Puccini’s opera. … not simply the sexist mores where Cio-Cio-San is a commodity, but the supremacist, imperialist and colonialist attitudes in the characters embodying male entitlement and coercion…Hume’s approach makes for a more disturbing experience than the romantic pull-at-the-heartstrings this work is assumed to be."

The Guardian

"WNO’s intelligent, insightful and, finally, piercingly emotional modern-day interpretation of this squalid story of exploitation and callousness. Tiny details take on epoch-defining significance. As The Star-Spangled Banner sounds in the orchestra, Pinkerton flourishes a credit card to pay for Butterfly."

The Times

"Hume isn’t afraid to press the emotional buttons either. Snipe all you like at Puccini’s ‘manipulative’ score but plenty of handkerchiefs will surely have had a workout when Sorrow added his toy dinosaur to Butterfly’s flower arrangement. No spoilers, but the final minutes were as swift, inexorable and brutal as anything on stage or screen. This might not be the Butterfly you expect, but it hits you where it hurts."

Spectator