Madam Butterfly, ENO, Coliseum, opera review: 'A visual feast'

Anthony Minghella's sumptuous Madam Butterfly (again revived by Sarah Tipple) made its sixth return to the English National Opera. It’s undeniably a visual feast, opening with a striking fan dance where reams of red silk billow around to create Butterfly’s obi which will in turn unravel to portray her death, and featuring a scene-stealing Bunraku puppet as her child. But for all that, the production provides thin pickings emotionally.

Puccini’s story of colonial exploitation of the 15-year-old geisha Cio-Cio San, who marries an American lieutenant Pinkerton – only to be unthinkingly abandoned by him and forced to give up her child for adoption when he returns three years later with a new American wife – is a shameless tear-jerker. Much rests on characterisation and vocal heft to bring off the emotional punch.

While the minor characters such as mezzo Stephanie Windsor-Lewis’s matronly Suzuki, Butterfly’s faithful maid, or Alun Rhys Jenkins as the marriage broker acquit themselves reasonably, George von Bergen’s hapless American consul Sharpless doesn’t quite command the role. Making his debut as Pinkerton is David Butt Philip, singing best at the moment of realisation of what he has done. But American Rena Harms feels damagingly miscast with a gestural vocabulary and persona so irredeemably Western that it would have taken a voice more sublime and expressive to convince of Butterfly’s fragility and infinite pathos.