This reimagining of Madame Butterfly turns Puccini’s orientalist opera into a queer tragedy, and relocates it from 1904 Japan to post-revolutionary Cuba and a world of sex work and Santería goddesses. Butterfly, the girl who gives up her religion and ultimately her life for the love of a western sailor, becomes Mariposa, a young male sex worker who transforms himself completely to try to win the heart of Preston (the Pinkerton character). It’s a strong idea – the sacrifice of the self in the desperate desire to be loved – but this production by UK-based, Gran Canarian choreographer Carlos Pons Guerra still needs some honing in the execution.
Poor Mariposa (Harry Alexander) is lost from the very beginning, wandering the Havana docks. Alexander is a tall, exquisite dancer best known for work with Michael Clark and Jules Cunningham, both notable for their exactingly technical and thoroughly un-dramatic work. So this is a huge departure, a role that asks almost too much in acting terms: a deeply layered inner world, and a complex connection between Mariposa and his stiff, repressed sailor lover (Daniel Baines), who is going home to get himself a wife. You can appreciate Mariposa’s vulnerability, you can feel it, but a character needs more than just tragedy across three acts.
The mood is like a once-pretty fabric with all the colour faded from it; a night-time world where the sun barely rises. But there are some shifts in tone. Pons Guerra finds some very inventive ways to show Mariposa at work with his clients (while still keeping their clothes on) – comical but grim, underlining the transactional nature of it all. And Elle Fierce brings spiky personality and glamour to the role of the brothel owner.
The show could do with a lot of tightening, but there is something potentially very powerful here, with rich ideas such as the use of the pointe shoe as a loaded symbol of femininity, and a surprisingly redemptive ending. The music by Luis Miguel Cobo features a few warm Spanish songs and a lot of darkly ominous rumblings, but the best bits are when snippets of Puccini’s melodies break through with their sweetly yearning, haunting beauty, and the drama momentarily transcends.
At the Place, London, until 26 February. Then touring until 21 March
