Cendrillon
★★★☆☆ Delicate
Pleasance Theatre: Mon 3 – Thurs 6 Mar 2025
Review by Thom Dibdin
Charm and charisma run through Edinburgh Studio Opera’s production of Cendrillon, Jules Massenet’s take on the Cinderella story, playing at the Pleasance theatre for three nights only.
Massenet uses Perrault’s version of the fairy tale, in an opera which is notable for its lightness of touch. Premiering in 1899, long before Disney or the writers of modern pantomime turned elements of the story into cliché, it is ripe for a modern retelling. Director Iona Boyd and her team do not disappoint.
Lara Keen as Cendrillon (front) with Nicole Dickie, Aarya Gambhir and Hannah-Rose Laverick. Pic Andrew Morris.
In this version there is no grate-side mournfulness to give Cinders her name; her step sisters are not ugly – even on the inside; pumpkin, mice and all are absent; and there is no Buttons character to provide unrequited love.
What we do get is a magnificent harridan of a stepmother in Nicole Dickie’s Madame de la Haltiere, feared by all around in her household. Including second husband, Finn Maguire’s feartie Pandolfe, who has come from the country to join the king’s court with his daughter, Cendrillon, relegated to the role of an unpaid household servant.
Dickie is magnificent as Haltiere, sweeping in with a real lightness of movement, but truly formidable in her demeanour. She has the voice to match, giving it enough oomph to be heard over the sometimes over-enthusiastic band, while allowing her voice to trip lightly through the music.
Dickie’s Haltiere is the classic pushy mother. Aarya Gambhir and Hannah-Rose Laverick as her daughters Noemie and Dorothee are somehow her backing singers, both vocally when they acquit themselves well, and in Boyd’s scheme when they do her bidding but are clearly uncomfortable with it.
Feckless
Boyd’s direction has Pandolfe as a somewhat feckless father, who knows he has let his daughter down but, unable to face doing anything about it, has resorted to his hip flask for emotional support.
Finn Maguire as Pandolfe is the most caricatured main role here. There is little nuance to his performance – and therein lies a tale: It is no bad thing that he is, but not necessarily for truly positive reasons.
Sung in English, without recourse to the electronic supertitles available to professional companies, the majority of the words are lost behind the band. A few clearly emphasised phrases stand-out, and there are some moments sung without orchestral support, but for the most part the storytelling relies on the colour of the music and the physical acting of the performers.
MD Kristine Donnan keeps the Edinburgh University Chamber Orchestra clear and precise, with particularly strong woodwind elements. However, with 31 players it is large for this relatively small theatre and Donnan does not always ensure that the balance between pit and stage is tipped in the performers’ favour.
Nor does Boyd have the audacity to simply put her singers on the stage’s sweet spot and let them hold forth. When they do come to the front, things are much better, but there is too much delivered in the depths of the stage,
This is not particularly helped by a programme which uses blue-tinted lettering on a black background, meaning that the synopsis is particularly tricky to read.
Not that such issues really impinge on the framing of the story as a modern fable or the telling of it from the point of view of its two main protagonists: Lara Keen as Cendrillon and Lily Hodge in the trouser role of Prince Charmant.
delight
Keen is a delight as Cendrillon. Unnoticed in the chorus of household servants for the early scenes, she steps out with a quite lovely clarity to her vocal performance. Keen also manages to convey the young woman’s doubts and hopes, as the good fairy character La Fee (Amy Worsfold) offers to get her off to the ball where her sisters are to be presented to the prince.
Hodge is all petulant teenage disregard for their parents as Charmant. Huffy, yes, but less spoilt brat than you might imagine – presented with a series of inappropriately waif-like young things as potential wife material in a well-judged comic parade.
The Royal party attempting to persuade Charmant to choose a wife is suitably comic in its turns. Sebastian Schneeberger as Le Roi, Benji Castillo-MacDonald as Le Surintendant de Plaisir and Ellen Macrae as Le Premier Ministre have the necessary diffident obsequiousness.
Ronan Mewawalla as Le Dean stands out, as he is pushed, reluctantly, to the fore as the party’s idea of who the Prince might want as a male partner. It’s a nicely worked reflection of the failure of parents to understand their children.
The scenes between Cendrillon and Charmant are excellently done. Their meeting at the ball is clearly a coup de foudre, their wandering in the forest in the third act has a tenderness to it, and ultimate first kiss – in front of the curtain no less – has passion enough to bring the house to its feet in the production’s final moment.
Almut Echtler’s costumes are not just well judged, but well made. The hints at extravagance and corsetry for the Haltiere family, red colour scheme for most of the human cast and a shimmering green for the fairies, all work to support Boyd’s ideas.
Leanne Malaika’s set, of a few choice items, hints at bigger things and, without need for change, leaves room in the third act for the fairy tree near which the lovers meet. Movement director Simon Hanks uses that space with spectacular result. Created as a moving tableaux by the fairy chorus, the tree is the production’s most significantly successful visual moment.
A light-hearted and welcome relief from real life, the production has its issues, but a lack of escapism is not one of them.
Running time: Two hours and 30 minutes.
Pleasance Theatre, 60 Pleasance, EH8 9TJ.
Mon 3, Wed 5/Thurs 6 March 2025
Evenings: 7.30pm.
Run ended: ESO website here.
ENDS
