La Fille du Régiment review: Love and slapstick come together on the battlefields

Stand and deliver: Tenor Javier Camarena steals the show as Tonio
Tristram Kenton
Nick Kimberley10 July 2019

Donizetti’s opera, La Fille du Régiment, is a sentimental comedy, with sentiment taking precedence over comedy. The threadbare plot is a sort of Dad’s Army take on the Napoleonic Wars, with zany soldiers, batty aristos and a lovestruck couple.

When, as a baby, Marie was abandoned on a battlefield, a regiment adopted her. Now fully grown, she has fallen for local peasant Tonio. Thanks to the machinations of the Marquise de Berkenfield, the lovers seem doomed never to get together, until Marie is revealed to be the Marquise’s daughter. Her upward mobility makes the lovers’ dreams come true.

Laurent Pelly’s 2007 Royal Opera production lets the sentiment take care of itself while turbo-charging the comic elements with sundry knockabout routines, neatly choreographed by Laura Scozzi. Sometimes it all seems rather strenuous but the cast and chorus play along enthusiastically and the laughter comes easily. Musically it’s not always the finest Donizetti but there are highlights, not least Tonio’s showpiece aria with its fusillade of top Cs. Mexican tenor Javier Camarena negotiates them with stand-and-deliver aplomb, and then, because he can, he releases another volley in an encore. Needless to say, the audience goes wild.

By contrast, the Marie of Sabine Devieilhe is most moving when she sings quietly: her voice has a transparent delicacy that is strikingly different from the tenor’s can belto. To add to the fun, Enkelejda Shkoza plays the Marquise like Margaret Dumont in a Marx Brothers film, and Miranda Richardson has a pungent spoken cameo as a haughty duchess. Great art? No, but who’s complaining?

Until July 20 (020 7304 4000, roh.org.uk)

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