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3The universality of its central themes of love and loss are easy enough to relate to; the Artistic Director of the ENO, Daniel Kramer, credits La Bohème’s prevailing popularity with the decision to restage its “near-perfect equilibrium between realism and romanticism, comedy and pathos, at whose heart lies the relationship between the forlorn couple of Rodolfo and Mimi”.https://www.ayoungertheatre.com/review-la-boheme-london-coliseum-3/
First seen in 2009, Miller’s Bohème nudges the action forward some 100 years to the ‘années folles’ of the 1920s. Café Momus becomes an edgy guinguette where Fitzgerald and André Breton might have traded writing tips with Rodolfo, and a Josephine Baker-esque Musetta (Nadine Benjamin) holds the stage. It’s a neat sleight-of-hand, nicely framed in Isabella Bywater’s revolving sets — an unobtrusive restoring of operatic order after Benedict Andrews’s teenage rebellion of a crack-den Bohème for ENO in 2015.
The cast was the strongest I have seen for some time at the WNO. Soraya Mafi was an ebullient Susanna whose exquisite honeyed timbre (notably fine in the higher registers) was matched by her exceptional acting. The phrase “star quality” is scattered about too liberally, but Mafi really does deserve the label.
