So-so revival only manages a flutter compared to last year’s offering on the Harbour.

Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House
January 27, 2015

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing fundamentally amiss with Moffatt Oxenbould’s 18-year-old production of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. It doesn’t creak at the seams, it has some very fine visual elements, not, least of which is a superb lighting design, and in the right vocal hands it would probably bear up better. It’s unfortunate, therefore, that it comes so soon after last year’s revolutionary Handa Opera production from the Spanish theatre company La Fura dels Baus, which found so many new and original things to say about the work, without resorting to the usual Japonisms.

^{Alexia Voulgaridou, Graeme Macfarlane & Samuel Dundas}

Not that Oxenbould himself embraces the Western view of Japan – he’s at pains to show us that world firmly through the eyes of a Pinkerton (ie. a skewed, misogynistic viewpoint) – but he clearly expects us to recognise the conceit, rather than passively endorsing it (as I suspect some of the less perceptive in his audience still might do). But by using stylised Japanese...