Candide review

Claudia Boyle’s Cunégonde sings it lustily to a bunch of dancing bin men in a Pythonesque setting superbly driven by Grégoire Pont’s hand-drawn, interactive animations. Projected on to a dark, semi-translucent curtain – behind which Karen Kamensek snappily conducts the onstage WNO Orchestra – locations whip past and cartoon figures writhe. They are as much enactors of Candide’s hectic eclectic tale as Candide himself; a vocally warm and agile Ed Lyon, whose comic timing is matched with verve by Narrator-cum-Pangloss Gillian Bevan and an excellent tumble of cast, WNO chorus and dancers.

The mix of 1950s Americana, Euro kitsch and steam-punk 18th century works a treat, with neat punk allusions in Pangloss’ Vivienne Westwood hairdo and some glorious gender-bending – not least in Mark Nathan’s entitled narcissist Maximilian, and the pointedly twinned debauchery of the auto-da-fé and roulette scenes. 

Candide and all around him are forced by a series of disasters to confront the jarring disconnect between the horrors of war, rape and religious extremism, and the callous optimism that such suffering is merely part of God’s design for “the best of all possible worlds”. Part-Gulliver, part-Phileas Fogg, Candide is in fact an abused refugee – but one who survives, thanks to a bizarre mix of murder and ‘miracle’, within which the sexual enslavement of Cunégonde, Paquette (Francesca Saracino) and The Old Lady (an outstanding Madeleine Shaw) is especially grim.

But none of Pangloss’ students actually dies – or at least, they always spring, cartoon-style, back to life. And of course, the ultimate irony is that, without some form of optimism, no such victim could survive. Indeed, in Bernstein’s clever Mozartian twist, Candide and Cunégonde turn out to be a kind of Tamino and Pamina, whose trials only bring them closer in determination to live simply, expressed in the concluding Make Our Garden Grow. 

Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, and then touring until July 15. More more information, visit wno.org.uk/whats-on/candide