Producer Raymond Gubbay's in-the-round Butterfly, directed by David Freeman, returns to Kensington for the fifth time in 12 years. It's doing things right. Well-sung music and moderate spectacle make for a production that meets every expectation, and offers zero surprise.
The opera is not a natural one for the Royal Albert's huge space, more suited to show than drama. The story of geisha Cio-Cio San, who refuses to believe her American soldier husband has deserted her, is a domestic tragedy of small and perfect unity - a softie's Oedipus Rex.
Its one location is the paper house which is our heroine's prize and prison. David Roger's house is pretty, surrounded by a charming pool, but the network of bridges round it makes blocking cumbersome.
It doesn't help that the staging requires face-time for audience members on all degrees of the circle. Any conversation below the intensity of gut-busting revelation is a prompt for performers to follow each other in circles around the stage, as if in some strange playground game.
The excellent amplification means it makes no audible difference but it's surprising how hard it is to engage with an aria when it's sung to the other side of the room.
Said singing, however, is just fine. Mihoko Kinoshita was Cio-Cio San last night. She pretends too hard to be 15 in the first act, and her English is far from clear, but in the second half - which is all her - she proves that she has the chops: a rich, reassuring soprano that protests and pleads in all the right places. As her tormentor, Philip O'Brien is a beautifully average All-American louse, genuinely bemused and a little angry when Louis Otey's dignified Sharpless suggests his new wife may have feelings.
Oliver Gooch conducts the Royal Philharmonic in a rendering that, homogenised by the sound system, waxes sentimental without drawing attention to itself. The lighting and chorus management is similarly unspectacular. The all-night vigil - one of the greatest coups de theatre opera has to offer - is pleasant. And there you have it: a doughty, safe offering.
Bread and Butterfly.
Until March 13, www.royalalberthall.com
Madam Butterfly
Royal Albert Hall
Kensington Gore, SW7 2AP
