Festival Opera

La boheme

Festival Theatre

Keith Bruce

five stars

THERE are essential details of the plot in Puccini's La boheme that resist updating, but Alex Olle, of Barcelona's La Fura dels Baus theatre company, quite simply ignores the inconsistencies of burning a manuscript from a writer using a laptop and the flickering candle of an embroiderer in a modern studio apartment in his pursuit of the compelling bigger picture of a quite superb contemporary production.

Poet Rodolfo and his pals are bohemians with first world problems. Their poverty is blatantly relative, on a set that recalls both the cover of Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti album and West Side Story. Eventually it transpires that their artists studios are in swanky duplex, with Mimi's attic apartment upstairs later occupied by a loved-up young couple. The sick soprano (a superb vocal and acting performance from Erika Grimaldi) is a bit of a downer that this self-obsessed coterie can't quite handle. When Colline the philosopher sells his coat for medicine for her, it is not the flash leather one he has worn all evening, but an "old coat" he retrieves from the closet.

Details like that are a delight in this production, like the introduction of a rough-sleeping bag lady at the starts of Act 3 to show how desperate for affection Mimi really is. That follows a visualisation of the Cafe Momus scene in Act 2 which I never expect to see bettered. Puccini's astonishingly clever music does all the work for a good staging here, but the pace and style with which the market traders, a superb children's chorus from the Edinburgh branch of the National Youth Choir of Scotland, and a brilliant rendition of Musetta's aria by Kelebogile Besong are deployed is truly breathtaking.

With conductor Giandrea Noseda and the orchestra of Teatro Regio Torino on top form in the pit, this is a classic staging of classic work.