Marionettes show
Hippolyte et Aricie
Manoel Theatre
This parody by Charles Simon Favart of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s work Hippolyte et Aricie was great fun!
The rest of the title, which is “…ou la belle-mère amoureuse” explains things. The original work was meant to be serious. Like so many baroque operas, it deals with gods and goddesses feuding and/or interfering with human affairs.
The nerdish Hippolyte, his timid weak courtship of the more-than- available Aricie and the mishaps of Thésée, the latter’s horrid first wife, and Phèdre, his second wife, lusting incestuously after her ninny of a stepson, were fertile ground for parody and satire.
Rameau’s original opera, dating to 1733, was soon parodied by others before Favart followed suit in 1742.
As one knows, opera requires utter suspension of credibility. For this production one needed a threefold such suspension, in that Jean-Philippe Desrousseaux’s artistic direction for the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles is a performance partly by puppets, with a smaller stage upon the stage.
Besides, one could actually see the puppeteers (Gaëlle Trimardeau, Bruno Coulon and Desrousseax) at work. But not only that; the latter also voiced the dialogue of the characters. However for Phèdre, this task was frequently entrusted to alto Marie Kalinine and that of Thésée to baritone Philippe-Nicolas Martin. Both these singers were in superb form. They also interacted with the puppet stage and the other characters, at the same time being close to the seven-strong Ensemble Philidor, directed by lead violinist Mira Glodeanu.
The fun was in the sending up of the whole situation. It was done so effectively and incredibly well that the audience was not given much respite because the comic situations kept cropping up in quick succession.
The synchronisation of the movements of the beautiful puppets was just great. They also flaunted flamboyant neoclassical baroque costumes for the males and 18th-century ones for the ladies.
The marine monster (a giant oyster in 1733) looked like a grumpy swordfish. And even more hilarious was the white hen and the laying of an egg with a hard wooden crash.
Kalinine’s coloratura rage aria and the antics of her puppet alter- ego was another marvellous moment: hilarious but, at the same time, highly admirable for the vocal technique, precision and clarity.
Martin was just as accomplished and one wonders when the anachronistic excerpt, namely the beginning of Divinités du Styx from Gluck’s Alceste (1767), could have been inserted by Favart long after the first performance of his parody. The latter also used other recognisable music by Rameau such as La Poule and the grand orchestral rondeau from Les Indes galantes.
I thoroughly enjoyed this show and so did the whole theatre judging by the applause, cheers and whoops from the audience.