The appendages of the same name in Poulenc’s comic opera Les mamelles de Tirésias are left blank by their owner, Thérèse, when she announced that she is a feminist and wants to rule the country – or go to war. She grows a mustache and leaves her position as propagator of babies taken over by her husband, who shows with a little ingenuity and willpower that anyone can do it.
This somewhat unpromising scenario – and the exploding breasts are juvenile or hilarious to taste – is introduced by the theater manager’s ironic announcement (or not?), in a prologue, that the moral of the drama is that France must make more babies. President de Gaulle, the country’s new leader, said much the same in a speech immediately after World War II, urging the French people to produce “12 million beautiful babies in 10 years.”
What may seem like an opera about gender transition as we know it that is decades ahead of its time is actually nothing of the sort, and director Laurent Pelly, probably wisely, does nothing to push it in that direction. Written in the 1940s and based on an earlier play by the surrealist Guillaume Apollinaire, The Breasts of Tiresias can more likely be described as a current contribution to the wider question of gender relations in interwar France, even if the position is disturbingly ambivalent. .
Poulenc’s easy-going, melodic music is translated into an entertaining poster-colour vaudeville by Pelly and set designer Caroline Ginet, and Elsa Benoit and Régis Mengus lead a fine, predominantly French-speaking cast under the exuberant direction of Robin Ticciati. There are some stunning theatrical performances, not least that of the more than 40,000 doll babies, the front row of which turn out to be choir members. But the opportunity to tap into contemporary debates about gender roles for a modern audience is largely missed.
Stéphanie d’Oustrac as Elle in The Human Voice
/ Glyndebourne Productions Ltd. Photo: Bill CooperFortunately, the work that accompanies it, also by Poulenc, La voix humaine (based on a play by Jean Cocteau, also recently adapted for the West End stage by director Ivo van Hove, and for the screen by Pedro Almodóvar), offers a more penetrating treatment of a subject that hardly needs updating. The main character, Elle (She), suicidally depressed from a breakup, spends 40 minutes on the phone, mostly talking to her former lover (when not dealing with crossed lines). Gradually and painfully, she begins to acknowledge what she must have suspected: that he left her for someone else.
Poulenc’s grievous, sensual score (beautifully conducted by Ticciati) fills the emotional turmoil that Elle tries to hide. Here she is sprawled on a slab—one hopes this isn’t the bed mentioned in the stage directions—the occasional tilt neatly suggesting the highs and lows of a depressed person. Her psychological state is also evoked by a pink horizontal strip that appears when she recalls happier times, but is eventually extinguished as the realization sets in.
One might think of directorial touches that further amplify the poignancy of the unfolding drama, but Pelly’s production serves up well enough given Stéphanie d’Oustrac’s mesmerizing incarnation of the broken woman whose last phone call we’re probably witnessing.
Glyndebourne, until August 28; glyndebourne.com