M Butterfly review

David Henry Hwang’s award-winning 1988 play is based on events that, two years earlier, led to the prosecution of two individuals in France on espionage charges. In 1993, David Cronenberg directed a film version with a screenplay by Hwang. More recently, the American playwright has authored the libretto of this opera, set to music by Chinese-born, American resident composer Huang Ruo and premiered in Santa Fe in 2022. In a concert staging by Kimberley Prescott based on James Robinson’s Santa Fe production, it arrives in London for a single performance, led by the two outstanding singers who created the original roles of René Gallimard and Song Liling.

Baritone Mark Stone and countertenor Kangmin Justin Kim provide extraordinarily detailed interpretations that explore, in its essential ambiguity, the relationship between Gallimard, a French diplomat posted to Beijing, and Song, a Chinese opera singer, whose long love affair lies at the heart of the piece. This complex bond is framed by the 1986 court case that brought their association to wide attention and led to the imprisonment of both on espionage charges. The ending is a surprise – and a shock.

The subject has clear connections to Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, although the dynamic is reversed – here the betrayer is the Chinese opera singer, the betrayed the Western diplomat. Sex, gender, race and imperialism all meet at the piece’s thematic centre. Hwang sees his opera as allowing Song’s identity to be “more fluid, as existing across a range”, than the character’s more binary status in the earlier play, in which “you see the character as a woman, but it’s a man”. It’s hard to imagine performances of the two central roles more subtle, more emotionally complex or more credible – both physically and vocally – than the interpretations delivered here. We see inside the heart and soul of two people and their interaction is profoundly involving.

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