Pelléas et Mélisande review – Debussy’s ethereal opera is luminous at Aldeburgh

Snape Maltings, Suffolk
This year’s Aldeburgh festival got underway with a stripped-back but ambitious staging by Rory Kinnear, distinguished by glorious playing and singing, and many inventive lighting effects

Trying to unlock the secrets of Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande, based on Maeterlinck’s symbolist play, is a slippery task at the best of times. Doing so in a barely there staging, with the orchestra on the platform with the singers, is even trickier. For the opening performance of this summer’s Aldeburgh festival, that was the challenge that reunited the conductor Ryan Wigglesworth, a featured artist this year, with the actor and occasional opera director Rory Kinnear.

Apart from some industrial-style pendant lights and a single high stool, there were no props or scenery – unless you count the orchestra, through which the characters stumbled as if the instrumentalists were the forest surrounding the castle. Costumes, likewise credited to Vicki Mortimer, were low-key: dark suits for the royal men, tattered bridal white for Mélisande, drab boiler suits for the silent onstage extras, who also provided the brief offstage chorus.