A classic in the making: Glyndebourne’s Poulenc double bill reviewed

One morning in the 20th century, Thérèse wakes up next to her husband and announces that she’s a feminist. Hubby, who’s been in either of two world wars, just wants his bacon for breakfast. Too bad: declaring herself male, Thérèse has already detached her breasts and hurled them spinning into the middle-distance. But they keep hanging around, great pink wobbly orbs floating just above her head. She takes out a gun and blasts them to shreds. Renaming herself Tirésias, and with her husband trussed into a moob-enhancing corset, she sets out to run the world, leaving the men to work out how to make babies alone. Babies (we’ve been told by an evening-suited Prologue) being an urgent national requirement.

More fizz, anyone? Les Mamelles de Tirésias comes after the interval in Glyndebourne’s Poulenc double bill, and it probably works best on an audience that’s been suitably lubricated, though Poulenc’s score (he adapted the libretto from a surrealist farce by Apollinaire) is a natural stimulant in its own right. Imagine music that’s equal parts innocence and experience: pastel-coloured waltzes, sudden, glinting shafts of satire and flushes of utterly unsentimental tenderness. It’s sexy, naughty and sweet; the orchestra leans in for a caress, then pinches you on the arse. And obviously, in the year 2022 there are a million and one ways in which a director with an agenda could take this whole pro-natal sex-change soufflé and turn it into concentrated culture-war poison.

Laurent Pelly does nothing of the sort, appreciating – correctly – that the only real butt of Poulenc’s humour is anyone literal enough to take it seriously. This is virtuoso nonsense delivered with a sensibility that’s as French as Jacques Demy or rioting farmers. Caroline Ginet’s designs present the whole thing as a three-dimensional bande dessinée.