L’Onore! Ladri!
VERDI
CONCEPT
Falstaff closes a cycle. With this Verdi opera buffa, Armin Heinemann bid farewell to eleven years at the helm of the Festival d’Òpera d’Eivissa, the island’s only annual opera season. A grand farewell, with one of the most difficult and original scores in the repertoire, carried by an artistic team forged over years of working together.
My participation lay in the realm of the actor-mime: alongside Miquel Gorriz, I played Robin, Falstaff’s page, in the interludes preceding each act. With no sung or spoken text, our work consisted of doubling in mime — as a small interlude — the plot explanations offered by the presenters (the journalist Laura Ferrer Arambarri in Spanish, the writer Ben Clark in English and Ibizan). A gestural work that, without falling into histrionics, held the rhythm and continuity of the show in the interstices where the opera breathed before resuming the singing.
This role of a supporting actor who adorns and empathizes with the spectator is, according to specialist critics, a hallmark of Heinemann’s productions: bodies that fill with humour and precision the gaps left by the deliberate absence of surtitles, a personal decision of the director that turned each pause between acts into a small show of its own.
SYNOPSIS
A fat man, a stolen honour, a revenge orchestrated by women who do not forgive vanity. But before each act, two mute figures — the page Robin and his companion — translate into gesture what the libretto leaves unsaid in Spanish, in English, in Ibizan.
Neither narrators nor jesters: bridge-bodies between the spectator and a century-old plot, between the silence of the absent surtitles and the laughter the audience needs to enter the final fugue. What is left of honour when everyone laughs at it? Falstaff loses it. Robin, the page, only observes and returns that loss turned into mute comedy.
An opera-fou that closes with a final boutade, and a small interlude show that, without meaning to, became its own closing party.
GALLERY
ARTISTIC CREDITS
- Classification: Opera buffa / Actor-gestural intervention (mime)
- Music: Giuseppe Verdi
- Production: XI Festival d’Òpera d’Eivissa / Amigos de la Ópera de Ibiza
- Year: 2017
- Venue: Palacio de Congresos de Ibiza, Santa Eulària des Riu
- Documented performance date: 15 September 2017
- Age rating: All audiences
- Stage direction / Artistic direction: Armin Heinemann
- Musical direction: Daniel Gil de Tejada
- Vocal cast: Christopher Robertson (Falstaff, baritone), Joan Sebastià Colomer (Ford), Albert Casals (Fenton), Jordi Casanova (Doctor Cajus), Vicenç Esteve (Bardolfo), Marc Pujol (Pistola), Maite Alberola (Alice Ford), Isabel Rodríguez (Nanetta), Mariel Aguilar (Mrs. Quickly), Laura Vila (Meg Page).
- Actor-mimes (interlude scenes): Miquel Gorriz — Innkeeper, Matilde Javier Ciria — Robin, Falstaff’s page
- Choir and Orchestra: Amigos de la Ópera de Ibiza
- Presenters: Laura Ferrer Arambarri (Spanish) / Ben Clark (English)
- Costumes: Armin & Stuart
- Set design: Armin & Jull
- Lighting: Katia Moretti
- Video: Marcos Cuevas
- Musical assistants and répétiteurs: Anna Crexells, Victor Galiano
- Stage management: Natalia Lavecchia, Almudena Rubio, Anahi Sandler
- Stage machinery: Sylvain Florence de Colin (Estudio Fleurimon, Paris)
- Hair: Maya María González
- Technical and stagehands: Marcos Cuevas, Streakka