Splendid revival of an unsurpassed production: Royal Opera’s Turandot reviewed

Puccini’s Turandot is back at the Royal Opera in the 40-year old production by Andrei Serban and… well, guilty pleasure is an unfashionable notion these days, but I still feel a batsqueak of shame at enjoying it so much. It’s not the chinoiserie – anyone who believes that an opera based on an 18th-century Italian pantomime should be taken literally is probably beyond help. No, it’s a Spectator headline from years back that still nags. ‘Turandot is a disgusting opera that is beyond redemption’ was the gist of a review of this same staging by the late Michael Tanner, and if it was anyone else you’d put it down to snobbery and move on.

But you can’t do that with Tanner, a thinker of piercing intelligence who spent decades interrogating how opera works and why it matters. We never discussed Turandot, but if we had, I’m certain that his arguments would have been unanswerable. And equally, that I’d still have sneaked along to Covent Garden and felt the same excitement at Calaf’s stroke of the gong, the same surrender as ‘In questa reggia’ steamrollered to its climax, and the same delicious hormone-rush at all that luxuriously stylised love and death.

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Perhaps I’d have countered that those pleasures are justification enough. Many (possibly most) of us do secretly enjoy the thrills that Turandot delivers more potently than any other opera: the sensation of being overpowered; the kinky, hot-cold tang of ritual colliding with animal instinct, and cruelty slicing through human warmth at its most vulnerable point. I don’t imagine for one minute that I would have convinced him.