Review: LA BOHEME, Trafalgar Studios

Perhaps the only thing left for Adam Spreadbury-Maher and Becca Marriott to do with their mission to bring La Bohème to a new public is a West End staging - and that's what we get, a year on from this production's debut (reviewed here) at the King's Head, Islington. Sung in English, set in Dalston, with men and women who live like we do - okay, with a little more tragedy and death of course, but that's the price we pay for Puccini - this is the opera for all your friends who "don't like opera" with its caricature image of toffs in dinner jackets, picnic hampers at country houses and Arts Council subsidies. They'll be disabused of such ill-informed tabloid tales within 30 seconds at the Trafalgar Studios.

Ralph (a failing writer) and Mark (a failing artist) share a cold flat and plenty of laddish bantz, but when Mimi from upstairs knocks on their door looking for a lighter, Ralph is smitten. Meanwhile, Mark is waiting in the pub for his on-off girlfriend Musetta, but she's off hustling drinks (and more) in North London's hipster bars. The two twenty-something couples make their way, for good and ill, within the whirligig of 21st century life.

Pared back to the four characters (well, four and a half, but that'd be telling), with no actor more than a few feet away - indeed, often as not literally amongst us - the singing has to be good and the acting excellent. Fortunately, it is.

Roger Paterson's Ralph almost literally falls for Mimi, sliding lower and lower on the grotty old sofa as he sorta seduces her, entirely convincing in showing just how a man can be bowled over in an instant. Thomas Isherwood's Mark (who "likes Trump") gets most of the funny lines (and there are plenty) in Act One and is pulled and pushed by his sense of right and wrong throughout.

But it's the women who carry the emotional heft (and, boy oh boy, is there emotional heft here) with Becca Marriott coyly coquettish in her preposterous Christmas jumper, then broken like a winged bird as she finds out that the drugs don't work. Honey Rouhani is worth the entrance fee for her entrance alone, wonderful in a wonderbra with more front than Brighton, beaming tart-with-a-heart charisma to all comers.

The singing, up close, is thrilling - visceral and elemental - but never less than controlled, and balanced beautifully by Paneretos Kyriatzidis on piano and William Rudge on cello. In a boutique opera, what you lose from the majestic sweep of Puccini's score, you gain in personal intimacy, one tune after another freighted with love, loss, fear, joy, the full palette of Italian emotions taken to eleven, so near you can taste them. As MTV showed a generation or two back, great music is different but just as great when unplugged.

There will be purists who claim that one too many liberties have been taken with a classic and that the transition from London larks to life or death struggle is elided too swiftly, but this is La Bohème - if it's not on somewhere in London now, it will be soon! For those who (like me) found our way to opera through productions like this, one's tempted to say that Adam Spreadbury-Maher has mastered the form, achieving all he (and other pioneers like Robin Norton-Hale) set out to do a decade or so ago in bringing opera up close to a new public.

So if you've never been to opera, now's your chance (and tickets start at a frankly ridiculous £15 for the quality on show). And if you have been before - well, you don't want to miss this one!

La Bohème continues at the Trafalgar Studios until 6 January.

Photo Scott Rylander