Taut as a drumskin: Dialogues des Carmélites, at Glyndebourne, reviewed

The three Just Stop Oil protestors were sitting in the stalls, somewhere near the middle of the front row. Someone had shelled out a cool £600 for those tickets – navigating the Glyndebourne website without, somehow, clocking the company’s loudly proclaimed commitment to sustainability (they even produce their own dyes for costumes these days, using plants from the estate) and then arriving at the venue without noticing the hilltop wind turbine, visible for miles around, which makes Glyndebourne probably the only opera house on Earth to be powered entirely by renewable energy. That kind of commitment to protest, coupled to that level of dim-bulb unawareness, commands a certain respect.

Their methods, not so much. There was a flash and a bang as they detonated their confetti cannon directly behind the oblivious head of the conductor Robin Ticciati. There’s a reason why shouting ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theatre is a standard metaphor for the acceptable limits of free speech. And anyone who’s dealt with orchestral health and safety knows that unexpected loud noises in close proximity to the human ear can cause temporary or, in some cases, permanent hearing damage. Think what you like about the motivation of stunts like this (and my initial hack’s reflex was that they’d just written the first two paragraphs of my review for me), but don’t pretend that it’s non-violent protest.

Anyway, the audience booed, black-clad Glyndebourne staff escorted the protestors out with the swift, quiet efficiency of royal bodyguards, and after a break for everyone to regroup, the performance of Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites continued where it had left off – with the aspiring nun Blanche (Sally Matthews) in her first meeting with the old Prioress (Katarina Dalayman). It was an intensely quiet and concentrated moment and in Barrie Kosky’s new production, the principal characters are placed under relentless, unforgiving pressure: standing motionless in the long, increasingly pregnant silences between scenes.