Madama Butterfly

A chamber staging of “Madama Butterfly” inspired by Pirandello’s dramaturgy.

Above all, this opera is a deeply painful and devastating intimate tragedy of the title female character. In our production, we have chosen to resist reducing the psychological drama of an abandoned and betrayed woman to melodramatic sensations and exotic spectacle.

"Madama Butterfly" is an opera about a woman whose child has been taken away from her. “Madama Butterfly” is an opera about a woman who commits suicide after they took her child away.

How could we distance such an opera from our present time, push it into the past and ship it off to the Far East? Our production of “Madame Butterfly” emphasizes the disturbing closeness of the tragedy of the female protagonist. At the very beginning, we meet our Butterfly as a contemporary woman, a singer preparing to perform in the opera “Madama Butterfly”, in which – as in a Hamlet-like theatrical mirror – she would re-live the experience of her own real life.

Our chamber and Pirandellian “Madame Butterfly” achieves its dramatic intensity through the proximity of the stage and acting performance, as well as by means of the theatre-within-theatre.