Review: La Fille du Régiment (Royal Opera House)

Review by Raphael Kohn

⭐️⭐️⭐️

If you think opera needs to be serious, melodramatic and tragic, look away now. Those with such misdirected preconceptions would be truly blindsided by the frothy fun taking over the stage of the Royal Opera House during their current season’s performances of La Fille du Régiment. I’m not complaining, mind. The opera world deserves to let its hair down just as much as any other, and the Royal Ballet and Opera (RBO) company are doing so in style in their run of La Fille, filled with light humour and a noticeable absence of seriousness.

I’ll caveat that a little bit. The plot is unserious. The staging is comedic. But the performances and creative vision here are absolutely serious – serious about being thoroughly entertaining throughout the almost-3-hour runtime. Sure, it’s a borderline-nonsensical plot, following an orphaned girl in the army who falls in love with a peasant despite being set up to marry a wealthier marquise. Does it make sense? Not really. Does that matter? Not at all.

It’s a puzzlingly absurd narrative, filled with unimaginably silly twists to resolve plot holes galore. But that’s the joy of it after all. There’s a reason why the RBO are reviving it, after all; it’s undoubtedly a crowd-pleasing joy. Now in its fifth staging at the RBO, Laurent Pelly’s larger-than-life production certainly doesn’t feel like a tired revival, instead feeling fresh and new.

To make it such a spectacle of silliness, Pelly leans fully into a larger-than-life concept, setting the entire production on Chantal Thomas’ sprawling maps to conjure an alpine background with a military twist, with the second act’s set decisively plonked on top at a borderline-unstable angle. It looks stylish and silly at once, draped in Pelly’s evocative costumes while slipping and sliding down the sharp slopes of the set.

But after all, this is ultimately an opera, and what is undoubtedly central is the music. Despite Pelly doing his best to inject some mirth into the production, Gaetano Donizetti’s score is pleasant if serviceable at best but regrettably forgettable at worst, leaving the cast with the arduous task of bringing it into life. The Orchestra of the Royal Opera House plays its way through under the baton of conductor Yves Abel, but he unfortunately doesn’t quite manage to bring out the energy he should, instead trundling through the score in a slightly unexciting way.

So it’s probably fair to say that La Fille earns its place in the opera canon thanks to its overall spectacle rather than solely on the merits of its score. That is with one exception though – the act one aria ‘Ah! mes amis’ (Ah! my friends), famed for its technical difficulty for the tenor taking on the role of Tonio. Thankfully, Juan Diego Flórez is perfectly up to the task, floating his punchy tenor into stratospheric heights as he meticulously masters the role. The applause after the aria practically lasted longer than the aria itself; I dare say it was well-deserved.

Opposite him is soprano Sara Blanch, in her RBO debut, taking on the lead role of Marie (the orphaned girl brought up in the military). She has an obviously excellent voice, taking on a clearly challenging role, and generally nails it throughout. Unusually for an opera, La Fille contains a speaking-only role, the Duchess of Crakentorp, taken on this year by the great Tamsin Grieg of Friday Night Dinner and Riot Women fame. She is, expectedly, brilliant, getting laughs galore in both her polished French and English ad-libs (expect a world cup joke or two coming!).

There’s plenty of fun from Donald Maxwell as Hortensius and Sonia Ganassi as the Marquise of Berkenfield, displaying fine vocal prowess alongside great comedic timing. The chorus of the Royal Opera House duly flood the stage in their massive ensemble moments, their voices filling the auditorium with rich vocal textures. It all gets a little bit muddled at times, with the orchestra under Abel’s baton overpowering the singers and unbalancing the mix slightly, but Abel just about manages to pull it back together whenever the seams begin to pull.

It all makes for a rather enjoyable night out. Perhaps the polish at times has chipped a little off Pelly’s production and might benefit from a few touch-ups, but the RBO’s La Fille still has the core elements that prove why it is such a crowd-pleaser, almost 20 years after its premiere. With a great cast and a joyous thread of humour tying everything together, the RBO have a fun enough evening on their hands to escape the hot summer nights to.

La Fille du Régiment plays at the Royal Opera House until 26th July 2026. Tickets from https://www.rbo.org.uk/tickets-and-events/la-fille-du-regiment-laurent-pelly-details

Photos by Tristram Kenton