Ai Weiwei will seemingly turn his hand to any medium. The artist and activist has explored some of his preoccupations — forced displacement, autocratic power, popular uprising — with enormous sculptures, porcelain plates and documentaries in recent years. Now he has embraced arguably the most complex art form of them all. Ai’s new production of Turandot at the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, postponed from two years ago because of the pandemic, is his first foray into opera; as he has repeatedly said in interviews, it will also be his last.
Ai transforms Puccini’s tale of love’s victory over brutality into a rallying cry for the world’s oppressed. The line-up of musicians inadvertently underlined the timeliness of this vision. Ukrainian conductor Oksana Lyniv has conducted written a defiant open letter to Vladimir Putin and taken to conducting with a sash in the colours of the Ukrainian flag wrapped around her waist. In the Rome production, she is joined by her compatriot Oksana Dyka in the title role.
But Ai’s bizarre, unfocused staging offers few meaningful insights. This sprawling multimedia production — for which the artist has provided the scenery, costumes and videos — is saturated with references to his best-known installations, with bomb-shaped headpieces, graphics of surveillance cameras and projected documentary footage depicting the Wuhan lockdown, Hong Kong protests and Rohingya refugees. Confusingly, Ai mixes lavish gowns, dragon-dancing and other picture-postcard depictions of traditional China with futuristic, bug-inspired garments. An inexplicable large frog clings on to Calaf’s back for much of the first act.
There are rare flashes of poignancy: video images of the Hong Kong protests accompanying the baying crowds of the first act powerfully evoke a sense of struggle; moving footage from a refugee camp is shown when Liù sings the words “Noi morrem sulla strada dell’esilio!” (“We will die on the road to exile!”). Other allusions feel tenuous and forced, not least when the projected faces of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden turn “Nessun dorma” into a generalised paean to a sleepless struggle against oppression.
If the central drama feels neglected, it does not help that Lyniv’s coarse reading of the score fails to breathe life into the characters. Playing is generally loud and lacking in nuance, and passages of potentially transportative exoticism are devoid of magic. Ai has cut the final love scene that Franco Alfano wrote after Puccini died, meaning this staging ends with Liù’s death rather than the usual redemption. Given the wooden performances on the opening night, this curtailment was not unwelcome.
Michael Fabiano’s full-throated Calaf is vocally impressive but one-dimensional while Dyka’s piercing Turandot has little chance to develop the character, given the cut. Francesca Dotto offered profound moments as Liù, but the spirited Ping, Pang and Pong (Alessio Verna, Enrico Iviglia and Pietro Picone) failed to cut through the overloaded staging. This production contains enough content to rival Ai’s new retrospective exhibition in Vienna. The problem is that there is little room for Puccini.
★★☆☆☆
To March 31, operaroma.it
