Mariusz Treliński has decided to shift the story of Puccini’s characters from the 18th century Paris and New Orleans into the contemporary reality of a corporate world. The original figure of the Chevalier des Grieux and the beautiful Manon Lescaut now find themselves in the station of the Warsaw underground. The director comments:
The metro station is a place that is taken out of time, through which we see moving an anonymous crowd. In our production it is a corporate crowd. It is a place where time and chance meet, and you can encounter a mysterious woman here, and you can also die in this place. It is a place of alienation and estrangement. In the original version of the opera, the characters are constantly moving. In our interpretation, the cities are replace with metro stations, which represent the phases of love, fascination and fall of the main protagonist. The whole story actually takes place in his mind, and it is a very subjective story.
Treliński admits that Manon Lescaut tells the story of a woman dreamt of and fantasised by all, but also a woman that doesn’t exist:
I am intrigued by Puccini’s portrayal of the relationships between men and women. He never depicts a relationship that would be parallel, symmetrical or equal for both partners. (…) There are always situations in which the strong and confident man dominates. He meets a lost and unhappy girl, the Butterfly type. Or, it is the other way around: the man falls into the trap of a demonic prototype of the femme fatale, a woman who threatens him and destroys him – such as Turandot or the said Manon.
The leading role is performed by the soprano Amanda Echalaz from the Republic of South Africa. Echalaz has proposed various scenes that seem contradictory. Treliński reveals:
In each of these scenes we encounter a different person, a different psyche and personality, and the performer as well as the actual heroine is incapable of making them mould into a whole. If we recall Bunuel’s The Dark Object of Desire, in which two actresses played the same woman, or The Lost Highway from David Lynch in which one actress portrayed two different women (…) we can come to a conclusion a man is incapable of grasping the essence of feminity and sees in it a playful masquarade series and a game.
The cast of the production is truly international. Performing and singing in Treliński’s Manon Lescaut alongside the aforementioned South African Amanda Echalaz are Thiago Arancam from Brazil, Pavlo Tolstoy from Ukraine and Mikołaj Zalasiński, Marek Gasztecki, Karol Kozłowski, Jacek Janiszewski, and Małgorzata Pańko from Poland. The orchestra performes under the baton of French Patrick Fournillier, and the set design is composed by the Slovakian Boris Kudliczka, who continually cooperates with Mariusz Treliński.
Manon Lescaut is a coproduction of the La Monnaie and the Welsh National Opera in Cardiff. The Polish performances are scheduled to take place on the 25th, 27th andf 30th of October, 2012. Belgian showings in La Monnaie take place from the 24th of January till the 8th of February, 2013, and the Welsh premiere is for the spring of 2014.
Editor: SRS
Source: press release, PAP, La Monnaie, Welsh National Opera