Classical & Opera: Winging it

A new and spectacular production of Puccini's Madame Butterfly is the brainchild of the impresario Raymond Gubbay, renowned for his impressive classical productions. Recently Gubbay has also ventured into the perhaps more precarious territory of opera, and his Butterfly follows on from a centenary La Boheme in 1996 and last year's Carmen. However, for Madame Butterfly, Gubbay is not going to be given a prettified chocolate-box rendering of the opera, for his director is none other than the ever-probing David Freeman, founder of Opera Factory.

Freeman is adamant that he is not simply working on a populist "spectacular". "How do you make something more popular?" he asks. "Butterfly is deservedly a popular opera already, but that's to Puccini's credit not mine. The idea that one can pump up its popularity seems ludicrous. All one can do is present it as truthfully as possible, pointing out some of the interesting issues the piece raises." Such as?

"The subject of Butterfly obviously appealed to Puccini - it's interesting, different, exotic. But the exoticism isn't just there for its own sake - it's there to tell us something fundamental about the human condition. I think that it is almost the first Western artwork to use an oriental background not simply for the purposes of decoration. To begin with, the opera isn't set in some mythical past, and, if you look at contemporary photographs of Nagasaki harbour around 1900, then you'll see a very "modern" and industrial scene. It's just such commercialism which Puccini's human theme exploits. Pinkerton's liaison with Butterfly is an extreme form of tourism. He's richer than her, and so he buys her."

The racial question seems fundamental to Freeman's view of the opera, and so both his twin casts contain oriental singers in the title role. "As soon as one sees the contrast between Pinkerton and his bride, then the entire piece immediately becomes more dangerous," he says. "The tragedy at the heart of the opera hinges around two vital incidents. When she marries Pinkerton, Butterfly is forced to become a Christian and, towards the end, the colonial Westerners come back to take away her baby. Butterfly is stranded - neither part of one culture nor the other; and that's shown to chilling effect in Act II when just she and her servant are left in this large and empty house, very much alone."

The conflicting sides of the two acts of Madame Butterfly are also going to be shown in a highly visual manner in the Albert Hall staging. During Act I, the arena will be flooded to form a water garden, with Butterfly's house built on stilts in the middle. During the interval the water is then drained away to be replaced by an ornamental stone garden. "The reason is to pinpoint this contrast of aspiration and its deflation. It also reflects on the Janus-like nature of the East in general - warm, welcoming and enchanting; or, on the other hand, cold and austere. But I'm not doing it to be grandiose for its own sake, and just because it's the Albert Hall doesn't mean I want my cast to act bigger either. Boxers, for example, don't box bigger in the Albert Hall. The opera's big enough already, and the more I work on it, the more my admiration for Puccini's innate theatricality increases."

`Madame Butterfly' opens on 19 Feb at the Royal Albert Hall, Kensington Gore, SW7 (0171-589 8212)