In one of his finest essays, Gore Vidal recalls that when he worked as a scriptwriter for MGM the Wise Hack always used to advise his toffee-nosed team that ‘shit has its own integrity’. If crap is what you’re producing, make sure there are no signs in it that that’s what you think it is. Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable fails that test, I think, as do the rest of his operas. And at the Royal Opera, where a new production by Laurent Pelly, shared with Geneva, is on display, there are plenty of indications that no one involved takes it seriously either.
When the curtain rose on knights in medieval armour, I thought for a moment that Pelly might be trying the revolutionary gambit of setting an opera in the period specified by the libretto, but then I noticed Bertram over the other side of the stage in a frock-coat and stovepipe hat, and saw the knights acting in unison and exaggeratedly, and realised we were in for an extremely long evening of camp. Actually, on this occasion, Pelly’s touch is so unsure that there are long stretches where Robert is played straight, or straightish, though the scenery gives it away. The palace at Palermo, for example, looks like a moderately expensive toy, and Isabelle, the heroine, pops up from a turret in only one of the many moments in the evening that caused a giggle to run through the audience
Not that keeping a straight face would save this work, unproduced at Covent Garden since 1890 for the most obvious reason. Kasper Holten, in his introductory note in the programme, writes about ‘Meyerbeer’s combination of great spectacle and shamelessly entertaining moral fable’, but he can’t have meant a word of that.
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