Meghan Lindsay and Douglas Williams in Pelléas et Mélisande | Photo by Bruce Zinger
Dubussy’s score has a gentle yet ominous beauty. The French libretto, adapted from Maurice Maeterlinck’s symbolist play, asks more questions than it intends to answer. Most intriguing to me, as a fervid David Lynch fan, was director Marshall Pynkoski’s admission that the late artist’s work was a creative pole star during the crafting of Opera Atelier’s production of Pelléas et Mélisande. And, indeed, Lynchian trademarks abound: psycho-sexual neuroses, dubious motivations and ambiguous identities, diabolical persuasion and violence creeping at the edges of almost every interaction. Dream logic is the engine of this narrative—not merely inviting interpretation, demanding it.
Gerard Gauci’s set provides an ever-looming forest backdrop, an impressionistic rendering on slightly shimmering, almost iridescent fabric, a place caught in perpetual, surrealistic twilight—a “forest of the unconscious.” As eerie as it is sumptuous, it sets the tone for this lyrically sordid tale in which a mysterious woman found at the edge of a pool ignites the lust of two brothers and sets them against each other. This is Mélisande, portrayed with a feverishly feminine mystique by soprano Meghan Lindsay. A prince lost in the forest, Golaud (bass-baritone Douglas Ray Williams), happens upon her and takes her for his wife. He doesn’t know how old she is or where she came from, but he’s compelled to save her.
Everybody here is compelled to indulge an array of perplexing behaviours. The whole scenario is quite glorious in its outlandish, cryptically meaningful flights of fancy. After Golaud brings Mélisande to his castle, she pretty much immediately falls for his younger brother Pelléas, portrayed with a boyish charm and naivety that is both endearing and exasperating, by tenor Antonin Rondepierre. There is something rather hilarious in the way they brazenly flaunt their affair even as they tremble at the consequences.
Jeannette Lajeunesse-Zingg’s choreography for the artists of the Atelier Ballet is well integrated into the storytelling. Portraying both royal attendants and mystical woodland spites, they swirl about the unfolding drama. Featured most prominently is Eric Cesar de Mello da Silva (credited as Eros), sensual and statuesque as he hovers over the dark, pathological romance with his bright red wings. Its fun to catch him pop up in the shadows before the light fully reveals his watchful, erotically controlling presence.
As we near the sorrow, dread, regret and death of the finale, some supporting players make a solid impression. Soprano Cynthia Smithers is a buoyant presence as Yniold, Golaud’s son, whom he enlists to spy on the not-very-discreet lovers, eventually traumatizing him. Bass-baritone Philippe Sly is the emphatically wretched (and eventually quite lecherous!) aging and ailing patriarch, Arkel. Soprano Measha Brueggergosman-Lee is regal and imposing as mother figure, Genevieve. The most thoroughly compelling portrait here, for me, is Williams’ toxic and tortured Golaud. There is a point, as he’s writhing in the throes of jealous angst, when his whole carriage seems quite unbalanced and precarious, as if he’s entirely drunk—which, in a way, he is!
I’d love to read Maeterlinck’s original play. There are so many elliptical narrative elements that intrigue me. All that warped, fetishy Rapunzel-esque stuff about Pelléas tying Mélisande’s hair in tree-branches, trapping her as he wraps himself up in the strands. Yniold reenacting the lover’s kiss he witnessed… on his father. Goloud’s neurotic relationship to his now-faded youth, with so many characters remarking on the grey in his hair and beard. Also, what’s up with society at large? Poor beggars keep dying at the fringes of this drama. Teeming with symbols, it’s all so hypnotic and unsettling.
Kimberly Purtell’s lighting design features evocative splashes of colour to draw the textures of the venue itself into the world of the story. Michael Gianfrancesco’s costumes are uniformly elegant. Christopher Bagan’s revised orchestrations are especially noteworthy. Reducing the original, intended for an 80-player orchestra, down to a 14-piece ensemble not only intensifies the intimacy, but has sophisticated intentionality. As Bagan elaborates in his orchestration notes, it is rooted in French harpsichord tradition and carried out on period instruments by members of the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra.
Both in its finely wrought details and sultry gestalt, Pelléas et Mélisande is swoon-worthy.
Pelléas et Mélisande
April 15 to 19, 2026
Koerner Hall
(273 Bloor Street West)
2.5 hours (including intermission)
Eric Da Silva and Meghan Lindsay in Pelléas et Mélisande | Photo by Bruce Zinger