Pelléas et Mélisande review – luminous semi-staging keeps opera's secrets

Trying to unlock Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande is a slippery task, made trickier here by a barely there staging that placed the orchestra on the platform with the singers. For the opening night of the Aldeburgh festival the conductor Ryan Wigglesworth was reunited with actor-director Rory Kinnear; apart from industrial pendant lights and a single high stool there were no props or scenery, and the instrumentalists became the surrounding forest.

Vicki Mortimer’s low-key costumes ranged from dark suits for the royal men to Mélisande’s tattered bridal white, while silent extras in drab boiler suits supplied a brief offstage chorus. Light did the visual work. Kinnear, with Paule Constable and Imogen Clarke, leaned into the score’s references to shadow and luminosity: characters moved through spots and pools of light or the gloaming of music-stand lamps among the orchestra.

debussy, pelléas, mélisande, aldeburgh festival, ryan wigglesworth, rory kinnear, vicki mortimer, semi-staging, orchestra onstage, lighting design