Review: PIMPINONE, Royal Ballet and Opera

It’s the aftermath of a Christmas party. The modular brown vinyl furniture catapults us back to the 60s, Women’s Lib, The Pill and all that. Wisely, director, Sophie Gilpin and designer, Anna Yates, refrain from loading up the period detail too much, tempting as it is to have a photographer walk in and ask, in an East End accent, if anyone’s seen Catherine. That balance is important because the story is timeless, perfectly suited to be set at any point in the 300 years since its 1725 composition by the prolific, if somewhat neglected, Georg Philipp Telemann.  

Vespetta (Isabela Díaz) passes the time by channeling a little of Truly Scrumptious’ dance on a music box from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang for her own amusement - she still in her (outrageous) party clothes, but she treats the fallout from the revelry with more than a hint of disdain. We learn that she is a housemaid, so she’s probably done this before, and that she’s feisty enough to have fallen out with past employers and confident enough to know she’ll snare another.

Pimpinone (Grisha Martirosyan) is a dissolute rich kid who’s beginning to feel he might be getting a little long in the tooth for the lifestyle. Hungover, he realises that this energetic young woman could work for him - a housekeeper with benefits, perhaps, too? - while she realises that he could provide a stable source of income and might be weak enough to be shaped to her will. A comic battle of the sexes ensues, familiar but good fun all the same.

The three scenes were first performed between the acts of Handel’s Tamerlano but, with a bit of bolstering from an instrumental work from the same composer, it makes for a witty boutique work, handsomely staged in the Linbury Theatre, one of London’s very best spaces (once you’ve dealt with the steps!) 

Critical to its success is the chemistry between the leads. Díaz has the tricky job of avoiding two stock caricatures as Vespetta moves from housemaid to housewife - the gold-digger with an eye for shiny earrings and the shrew with the scolding tongue. This she effects with no little charm and, though she doesn’t love him as she loves her, she displays enough affection to allay concerns that her motives are purely transactional. 

Martirosyan introduces us to Pimpinone as a typical drinking, gambling, womanising Hooray Henry, but he softens as he sees a more meaningful life ahead with Vespetta, who can do much more than merely clear up after him. In the third act, he attempts to lay down the law to his freethinking wife, but he’s rebuffed fairly easily and you have to wonder if his heart was really all that coercive blustering. 

Both singers, the director, and the conductor, Peggy Wu, are second year Jette Parker Artists, the remarkable development programme that has produced a conveyor belt of operatic talent for this house and many more around the world. But aside from a little early nervousness, there is no sense that this is a “student show”. Ms Wu is in command of players from the ENO orchestra (as reliable as ever), Díaz’s soprano is clear and precise in an often unsympathetic German language and Martirosyan’s baritone brings out his churning emotions beautifully. On top of a lot of words (there are times that the piece goes Sondheim in its density), they also deliver an extraordinary volume of prop work, which I found terrifying to watch so I can only imagine what it was like to do!

As someone who was introduced to this art form through boutique productions, it’s very pleasing to see work like this in a space like this. Opera can tell small, intimate tales as well as fill the vast canvases of Aida or Boris Godunov, but the acoustics of the back rooms of pubs and the three-piece bands to accompany singers can diminish them a little. No such gripes here!

So it’s an absolute delight to see a relatively obscure composer’s work given this stage. We get a complex and comic story working as pure entertainment, alongside a critique of male controlling behaviour that provides a bit of a guide as to how to resist it. Vespetta, unlike her husband, does not get checked in the title, but, like the wasp for which she is named, she has a sting in her tail and has to be watched. One could say the same thing about the show as a whole.     

Pimpinone at the Linbury Theatre, Royal Ballet and Opera, until 17 May

Photo images: Camilla Greenwell

 

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