Richard Brunel, author and director of this adaptation, has worked with composer Florent Hubert to create a new work based on Maeterlinck's play and Claude Debussy's opera. Four singer-actors, including the brilliant Judith Chemla as Mélisande, and four instrumentalists, and you have the jewel of French symbolism and Debussy's only opera reduced to its essence, stripped down to its essentials.
A bold undertaking, but a legitimate one: after all, was it not Debussy's ambition to free opera from its artifice, mannerisms and clichés? We are almost there: a woman about whom we know nothing, torn between two men, a woman who will not give in, a story of jealousy, passion and revolt that ends in death, although as a choice, defying convention.