Review: IL SEGRETO DI SUSANNA / PAGLIACCI, Opera Holland Park

Jealousy and suspicion unite Opera Holland Park’s double bill of short Italian works from just over 100 years ago. Ruggero Leoncavallo’s much performed Pagliacci is usually paired with Cavalleria Rusticana, but here it’s opener is Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s Il Segreto di Susanna. Sure enough, they go together like mozzarella from Campania and tomatoes from Sicily.    

Segreto pitches a newly married couple against each other, the husband suspecting the wife of being one of these modern women who walks out unaccompanied in the afternoons and might even have taken a lover. His evidence? The lingering smell of cigarette smoke in a house of non-smokers. 

There’s more than a touch of Noel Coward’s Private Lives in the bickering, but no undertow of real violence in their exchanges. That lightness in tone is underlined by John Savournin’s silent movie comic stylings as the servant Sante, a non-singing role, but delivered with his usual panache. Clare Presland (just back from illness and maybe a touch underpowered) and Richard Burkhard (singing in a pink suit would you believe) have a lot of fun and John Andrews is almost a turn in his own right conducting the always reliable City of London Sinfonia.

Just about when this 2019 production is about to outstay its welcome, there’s a nice little twist and we’re done in 45 minutes. Pleasing on the ear, but without the epic quality that one might expect of an opera, not that such bombast would sit well with what is really a drawing room comedy.

Travel back a few more years, venture in the wild South of Italy where paganism shakes hands with Catholicism and we encounter the Grand Guignol of the murderous clown and his doomed wife. Done as a play, we would be in real potboiler territory, but opera’s format elevates and deepens the melodrama, none more so than in the celebrated aria, "Vesti La Giubba". 

This is the moment when Canio (the leader of the troupe and soon to be cuckold) puts on the clown, Pagliaccio’s, make-up and costume, forcing real-life and his tragic role in the commedia dell’arte production to merge in his mind. There’s a point here about how fiction and fact can overlay and reinforce each other in a world of deep fakes and conspiracy theories, but we’re too invested in the love triangle and the fate of poor Nedda to go there.

David Butt Philip catches the menace of Canio but the pathos is less prominent than I’ve seen in previous productions. Some of that is the product of changing attitudes to infidelity, after all who is going to blame Nedda (Alison Langer, super), trapped in a loveless marriage, these days? 

But I suspect there’s more to it than that. Canio is a murderer within the context of domestic violence and, as a well-informed essay in the programme by Thomas Dixon tells us, the criminal justice system makes allowances for such circumstances even today. He’s a bastard though and the mitigation argument will get very short shrift these days and, probably wisely, director Martin Lloyd-Evans, doesn’t push that angle with any conviction. The last sight we get of Canio, he’s wearing a rictus grin, a Mansonesque look in his eye - and we have no sympathy. 

Robert Hayward stumbles and shambles in the somewhat thankless role of the disabled Tonio, obsessed with Nedda who is unnecessarily cruel in her rejection of his advances (albeit that’s a bit of a euphemism). Harry Thatcher is handsome of face and voice as Silvio, Nedda’s lover, but the show is stolen by Zwakele Tshabalala in the minor role of Beppe, Canio’s sidekick, whose aria 'O Colombina il tenero fido' is the vocal high point of the evening.

Roll in a fine chorus and children from Pimlico Musical Foundation, and you have a proper opera experience distilled into 75 tumultuous minutes. Any fan of the form should see a Pagliacci, maybe two, as it’s perfectly possible to take a whole range of reactions away with you after the terrifying denouement. 

Only opera can do it though - no wonder this one is such a fixture in the repertory.          

Il Segreto di Susanna and Pagliacci at Opera Holland Park until 3 August 

Photo images: Ali Wright

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