Of ‘Butterfly’ and Men: Robert Wilson Directs Diana Soviero at the Paris Opéra

Abstract

In NTQ40 (November 1994), in the first of two pieces on modern directorial approaches to the staging of opera as music theatre, Maria Shevtsova discussed Peter Brook's production of Impressions de Pelléas, complementing her own analysis with an interview with one of the leading actor-singers, Vincent Le Texier. Pursuing a similar dual-faceted approach, here she provides a detailed explication of Robert Wilson's production of Madame Butterfly, seen at the Opéra de Paris Bastille in 1993, exploring the ways in which Puccini's original orientalisms are translated and transmuted into a version of intercultural theatre appropriate to our own fin de siècle. Again setting her own views against those of a leading actor-singer – here, Diana Soviero, who played Butterfly – she explores how Wilson's coolly aesthetic, even ascetic style ‘incarnates the century's tentacular, monopolistic tendencies (of which interculturalism in its many guises in the arts are a sign), as well as its polyvalencies (of which the blurring of genres – hybrid genres – is a sign)’. Maria Shevtsova, who teaches in the Department of French Studies in the University of Sydney, earlier contributed a three-part survey of ‘The Sociology of the Theatre’ to NTQ17–19 (1989), and recently published a major collection of essays, Theatre and Cultural Interaction. Her present article forms part of research supported by the Australian Research Council Large Grants Scheme.