Dragon Review: Madam Butterfly – Grange Park Opera

Published on: 9 Jun, 2025
Updated on: 9 Jun, 2025

The beautiful Madame Butterfly (Hye-Youn Lee) captures US naval officer B F Pinkerton’s heart.

By Alice Fowler

With a simple – if tragic – plot, and a ravishing musical score, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly must stir its audience to succeed. Grange Park Opera’s new production achieves this with aplomb, thanks to a superb performance by South Korean soprano Hye-Youn Lee in the title role.

On an opening night on which the heavens opened, Lee and a uniformly excellent cast, alongside wonderful playing by the Gascoigne Orchestra conducted by Stephen Barlow, ensured there was scarcely a dry eye in the house.

In our new era of trade wars and deals, Madama Butterfly’s plot feels oddly timely. The action takes place in the Japanese port city of Nagasaki around 1854, shortly after Japan was forced by the US to reopen to trade with the West. In the ‘wild west’ years that followed, temporary marriages between western bachelors and native wives were common.

Butterfly and Pinkerton (Luis Gomes) marry, with very different hopes and intentions.

Such a fate befalls Cio-Cio-San – known as Butterfly – who has become a geisha after her father’s death. When a marriage broker arranges her marriage to US naval officer, Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, Butterfly falls whole-heartedly in love. Pinkerton, on the other hand – deftly portrayed by Portuguese tenor Luis Gomes – believes his marriage vows can be discarded like a 999 year lease. He drinks to the day he will be married to a ‘proper’ American bride.

American Consul Sharpless (Ross Ramgobin) keeps painful truths hidden.

His fellow countryman, the American Consul, Sharpless (Ross Ramgobin, also excellent) knows this ugly truth, but keeps it from Butterfly. When Pinkerton’s war-ship leaves Nagasaki soon after their wedding, Butterly waits faithfully for him to return. Three years later, Pinkerton finally does come back – but brings his American wife with him. The scene is set for the opera’s heart-rending denouement.

Sung in Italian with English surtitles, all this is saved from predictability by the depth and delicacy of Hye-Youn Lee’s performance, particularly in Acts Two and Three. Many tender scenes are shared with her young son Sorrow, conceived on her wedding night, and memorably played by the talented, if very young, performer, Charles Wilson Jackson. Kitty Whately also shines as Suzuki, Butterfly’s maid, who grasps her mistress’ predicament far more clearly than Butterfly herself.

Director and designer John Doyle has created a simple but highly effective set, with a screen print backdrop and three long bamboo blinds which rise and fall as the action intensifies. Lighting, by designer Tim Mitchell, is effective, particularly in a scene where Butterfly, having seen Pinkerton’s ship return to port, fills her house with flowers to greet him.

The Gascoigne Orchestra, led by Robert Salter, were in excellent form on the night I visited, with Puccini’s stirring melodies, with their distinctive Japanese inflections, masterfully played. After heavy rain on opening night, the forecast is now set fair. Do make a trip to the Theatre in the Woods at West Horsley Place, if you possibly can.

For details of Grange Park Opera’s full 2025 Season, see https://grangeparkopera.co.uk