Painful triangle

The Royal Opera’s season isn’t awash with new productions, in fact until Christmas only has two thirds of one, but that was what it got under way with: all three short operas of Puccini’s Il Trittico, with Gianni Schicchi revived, and Il Tabarro and Suor Angelica fresh; they are all produced, and mainly very well, by Richard Jones, but each with a different designer. For the gritty naturalism of Il Tabarro (The Cloak), Ultz provides a range of blacks and greys, hardly redolent of the Paris where the opera is set, but adequately lowering to the spirits.

Tabarro begins with a swaying Debussy-esque figure, conveying the movement of the river and barges, but, also, cleverly in this production, the eternal procession of weighed-down stevedores. The pervasiveness of drudgery, boredom and frustration is so strongly established in the opening moments that much of the rest of the opera seems superfluous. Puccini is always intent on conveying the quotidian atmosphere in which sensational events will occur, but here he might be thought to do it all too efficiently.