Dandelion

Prologue

Two musicians, one with a Western instrument and one with a Japanese instrument, play the American and Japanese national anthems at the same time (both anthems are played in the opera). While the two melodies play against each other they lose their shape and stop being ‘music’. What is left is noise, though it isn’t unpleasant to hear.

Some masked children are playing while another group of children walk together. Except for one; that child has no mask and is on his own, watching a game he cannot join and walking alone behind the others. He is Dolore, son of Cio-Cio. Born from two bloodlines but belonging to neither, he grows up outside the group, carrying the pain of his mother’s suicide.

At one side, two people are sitting. Suzuki, now old, and Dolore, now grown. Suzuki has just finished the story. Dolore has finally heard who his mother was and how she died. He falls to his knees in distress.

While he is crying, the story Suzuki has told begins again, now as the opera. When it reaches the end, we come back to this moment, to this same crying. Dolore has now understood the sacrifice his mother made.

Prologue: masked children, Dolore apart, Suzuki and grown Dolore on the Holland Park stage

Act I. The house and the stage

The orchestral prelude is short, but in it the audience first experience the stage space of this production. It is one space that becomes many: opening through a series of doors. Beyond the outermost door is the outside world, then the garden, the living room and finally, the bedroom. Suzuki and the servants set up the house. On the high place of the alcove on the left of the stage they place the household shrine. Behind it they hang a scroll with the name of the God. On the right they hang the family’s scroll. A servant places the sword below the family’s scroll. At the bottom of the alcove is a low cupboard with sliding doors.

Goro and Pinkerton, an officer in the US Navy, come in through a gate into the garden, then through the garden door into the living room. The marriage broker Goro shows Pinkerton around. Pinkerton has his gun on his belt and carries a briefcase with whisky inside it. As they move through the doors one by one, the audience realises the structure of the house. This constant movement through the doors is also how the audience identifies the different rooms.

In Japanese culture, when you enter a house, you remove your shoes. Pinkerton does not know this. He walks into the living room with his shoes on. Behind him the servants follow on their knees, quietly wiping away his footprints. They bring him a pair of slippers to put over his shoes so that he does not dirty the floor. Pinkerton wears them and after that the servants no longer need to wipe the floor behind him.

Pinkerton looks around the house as if he were looking over a rental property. He has the sword removed and sets his own pistol where the sword had stood. A servant takes the briefcase he brought and sets it beside the alcove.

The shrine and tokonoma with a decorative sword

The same wall, the sword replaced by Pinkerton’s gun

Act I. Pinkerton and Sharpless

Sharpless, the American consul, arrives. He has lived in Japan for a long time. Without being asked, or even thinking about it, he takes off his shoes at the threshold. A servant takes them. The difference between the two Americans is all there in their manners. One entered with his shoes on and was given slippers. The other takes his off at the threshold himself.

Servants bring drinks, a low table and cushions from beside the alcove. They start to set the place in the middle of the stage. But Pinkerton has them move it in front of the alcove. Confused, they do as he asks. Sharpless quietly slides his cushion out towards the middle of the stage — there is a household shrine in the alcove, so he avoids drinking in front of it. It is the behaviour of a man used to this country. Pinkerton watches and is thrown while Goro scolds the servants. They take the cushions away and bring two boxes instead. Sharpless tells them to place them in the middle of the stage, so the drinking table ends up well away from the alcove.

The servants lay the table with Japanese drinks. But Pinkerton sees this and goes over to the alcove. He takes milk punch from his briefcase and sets it on the shrine, then takes out the whisky as well. A servant rushes over and moves the bottle from the shrine to the table. Pinkerton offers Sharpless milk punch or whisky. The servants take away the Japanese bottles and Pinkerton’s briefcase. Suzuki comes back with a cushion and sits to one side of the living room. As they drink, Pinkerton raises a toast to the real American wife he will take one day. Suzuki, who is pretending not to listen, reacts in shock. That toast says that, in Pinkerton’s mind, this marriage is temporary. Sharpless listens in silence.

Then Cio-Cio arrives. She is fifteen and carries her father’s sword wrapped in cloth. It was a gift from the Emperor, given with an order for him to end his life. He followed that command and killed himself when the family fell into ruin. When everything else was sold, this was the one thing that was kept. Suzuki takes it from her and puts it in the low cupboard while above it Pinkerton’s gun occupies the higher place.

Act I. The wedding

The Chorus enters wearing masks through the audience and as they do so remove them, smiling at everyone. Yellow parasols open, until the whole stage and auditorium become a field resembling dandelions. These are the bride’s people. On the groom’s side there are only a few Americans; Pinkerton’s fellow officers and sailors in uniform: a small foreign group at the edge of a Japanese crowd.

Behind this brightness and the smiles, the guests have not really come to celebrate. Inwardly they think that marrying an American is beneath her. To her face they compliment her, while judging the groom and whispering that he will soon leave her. This obvious, smiling hypocrisy is itself a kind of mask. Here the uncovered Japanese face is more of a mask than the covered one.

Once the marriage vows are made, her friends call her by the Western name the Americans have given her. ‘Madama Butterfly’, the title of the opera — and when it is spoken here by her own people, they laugh. Only for that moment of mockery do they lift the real masks to their faces and lower them again. They cover their faces at the one moment when their real feeling shows. And at the wedding of a bride who has converted, they call on their gods. O Kami, O Kami. The very gods she has rejected. Cio-Cio hears the laughter as a blessing. For her the vows have just made her an American wife and she puts on her own mask. The mask is the sign that she has become an American. From this point she behaves as she believes an American wife would.

Wedding: yellow parasols, chorus in white, the house as a field of dandelions

Act I. The curse

Cio-Cio’s uncle, Bonzo (the Bonze), arrives and curses the wedding — many productions read this as Bonzo cursing Cio-Cio, but I want to read it as a curse on this marriage and on the American man she is marrying, not on her. He says he knows Cio-Cio has been going to a Christian mission and has abandoned the gods of her ancestors. Cio-Cio believed no one knew of her religious conversion. Bonzo believes that in doing so she is trying to abandon her own people. But he also feels sorrow for Cio-Cio, directing his hostility towards Pinkerton.

The chorus put their masks back on and turn away. The same guests who were pretending to celebrate only a moment before now leave. That indifference is their truth. Pinkerton shouts at him, ‘Basta! Basta!’ The Americans who have been standing at the edge of the wedding step forward and point their guns at Bonzo. This is the change. A moment ago this was a Japanese gathering, now foreign soldiers are pointing Western weapons at a Japanese monk on Japanese ground. Bonzo steps back in front of the gun, as do the Japanese guests, with the whole group following the monk down the hill and leaving Cio-Cio with the Americans. It is not the curse that sends them away, it is the guns. The old faith does not retreat because it has lost an argument; rather it is threatened at gunpoint.

While every other face is behind a mask, Cio-Cio’s is the opposite. Her mask comes off, she doesn’t need to perform now. Cursed and cut off from her people, she now stands alone as herself, a bare-faced Japanese girl. When the stage finally empties, three people remain: Cio-Cio, Pinkerton and Suzuki, the only Japanese who does not leave her.

Act I. Love duet

This has the most beautiful music in the opera and is where the production presents its most painful image. It is also the only scene outside Suzuki’s memory. Everything else in the opera is something she witnessed; but not this. It is the first night of the marriage, the night Dolore is conceived and she cannot be in that room. Although she may have heard something through the wall, that is not the same.

Suzuki may be telling her story, but as this is the one scene she did not see it can’t be shown through her eyes, nor through Cio-Cio’s or Pinkerton’s. Instead the production shows the moment as an image of its own. This scene is known as the love duet, but the image here is not a loving one. The girl is pinned like a specimen. The beauty of the music does not make the image softer, it makes it sharper.

Light from the wall casts a grid of shadows across the floor and over their white clothes. The whole stage becomes the mesh of a net. Pinkerton calls her a butterfly: ‘Mia Butterfly! come t’han ben nomata tenue farfalla’ — ‘My Butterfly, how well they named you, delicate butterfly.’ At those words she pulls her hands back and answers in fear. ‘Dicon che oltre mare se cade in man dell’uom, ed in tavola infitta!’ — ‘They say that across the sea, when a butterfly falls into a man’s hand, it is pinned to a board.’ Pinkerton smiles and answers. ‘Io t’ho ghermita. Ti serro palpitante. Sei mia.’ — ‘I have caught you. I hold you trembling. You are mine.’

And it is staged exactly like that, as a series of actions. He catches her, lets her go, touches and arranges her, as a collector handles a specimen and fixes it onto a board. Her arms are opened like wings and held there. She is turned and placed until she is in the position he wants.

Love duet: grid light on the floor, Pinkerton arranging Cio-Cio

Act II. Three years later

Three years have passed. During the short orchestral prelude, Cio-Cio changes into the Western clothes Suzuki has brought her and in return gives her the Japanese robe she was wearing. Suzuki folds them away, putting them in the cupboard beside her father’s sword.

Cio-Cio keeps wearing the Western clothes, even though a Japanese woman bound to a foreign man was called a rashamen. Despite that scorn Cio-Cio stands upright, sustained by one bright hope. The hope that Pinkerton will come back and she will be his real American wife. After all, she is a dandelion that even though trampled does not break. She changes not only her clothes but the way she moves for the rest of the act.

Cio-Cio has become an American wife, waiting for a husband who, despite leaving three years ago, has never written. Her ‘mask’ is now that she wears Western clothes and moves in a Western way. However this is all a performance. She is borrowing the clothes, the manners and the imitated devotion. The alcove remains the same as before but an American flag and a butterfly specimen case have been added.

After Suzuki puts Cio-Cio’s clothes in the cupboard she takes the gun and flag down to the floor. Kneeling on a cushion in front of the shrine she prays to the gods of Japan, asking them to keep Cio-Cio from crying. When the prayer ends Cio-Cio says the gods of Japan are lazy. She lifts the shrine down into the cupboard underneath and takes the scroll of the god’s name, rolls it up and puts it in with the shrine. Then she sets the gun and the American flag on the high place where the shrine stood. Cio-Cio places her mask there alongside the gun.

Director’s noteI would like her actually to wear the mask through the act, but that is difficult in practice, so this action stands for her wearing it.

The shrine still in place; gun, flag and specimen below

The shrine taken down; gun and flag on the high place

Act II. Un bel dì

Cio-Cio’s aria describes in detail the day Pinkerton’s ship will return. A line of smoke on the distant horizon, the white ship coming into the harbour, the man walking up the hill, the names he will call her. She is not remembering something that happened. She is teaching Suzuki, and herself, exactly how it will happen. This is the most famous music in the opera and Cio-Cio sings it with complete certainty to Suzuki, who now does not believe a word of it.

Director’s noteWe now know who Cio-Cio is. The singer performing this knows it too. For this one aria I want to leave the movement unplanned and let the singer express it in their own way. If until now the singer has worn a mask the director placed on them, this is the one moment when they can step out of that mask and simply be themselves.

Act II. Sharpless

Sharpless comes to read her a letter from Pinkerton, but every time he begins, her excitement runs ahead of his words and he cannot get even the first line out.

Suzuki starts to wait on them, but Cio-Cio stops her and serves Sharpless herself. In the way she offers him a cigarette, kneeling and bowing low, holding it out with both hands even in her Western clothes, she can’t help behaving the way she was raised.

Goro keeps appearing and disappearing through the door between the garden and the living room, watching and listening for a moment when he can interrupt.

Act II. Yamadori

Goro has arranged a marriage for Cio-Cio with the wealthy Yamadori, who has already arrived in the garden. His servants follow him only as far as the garden and stay there. He is wearing Western clothes, which in the Japan of this time is a mark of wealth and success. However, he walks awkwardly: in geta, held by a thong between the toes, his steps are short, but in Western shoes that hold the whole foot, he walks faster and takes longer steps than his servants. The same distance, but a different number of steps. His wealth is also shown by his pocket watch on a gold chain. He looks at the time, ironically in front of a woman who has waited three years for her husband to return. Meanwhile his servants are standing in the garden carrying gift boxes in their arms.

Yamadori comes into the living room and encounters a problem when he has to sit down. Western trousers are cut for a body that stands or sits on a chair, not for a body kneeling on the floor. He gathers the trousers up around his knees like a skirt before he can lower himself. He ends up lowering himself awkwardly and rather comically into a Japanese way of sitting. When he moves, the suit gives him an advantage. When he stops, these clothes do not sit well on a Japanese floor.

Goro is in the doorway. He goes between the garden and the living room, slipping through the sliding doors and moving between the two men and Cio-Cio, like a broker trying to manage all sides. Cio-Cio receives Yamadori with perfect politeness but refuses the offer: she belongs to Pinkerton, and she is committed to her new life as an American wife. By her new law she is a married woman and she will not hear anything different. Yamadori leaves. The servants who were waiting in the garden pick up the gift boxes and follow him out. Goro remains in the garden.

Yamadori kneeling in a Western suit, gathering the trousers at the knees

Act II. The letter and the child

Now Sharpless and Cio-Cio are in the living room, with Suzuki waiting in a corner. At last he takes out the letter. ‘Now, just the two of us,’ he says, and sitting beside her starts to read the letter from the beginning. Each time he pauses, her happiness runs ahead of the words. He never reaches the important part: Pinkerton is returning to Japan, but not to her.

He gently asks what she would do if Pinkerton never came back. Cio-Cio has Suzuki bring the child out from the bedroom. Pinkerton’s son, whose existence Sharpless is completely unaware of. She introduces the child. ‘Oggi il mio nome è Dolore. Però dite al babbo, scrivendogli, che il giorno del suo ritorno, Gioia, Gioia mi chiamerò’ — today my name is Dolore, sorrow, but on the day my father returns I will be called Gioia, joy. In this production his name stays as Sorrow forever. Cio-Cio asks Sharpless to write to Pinkerton and tell him that his son is waiting.

Suzuki has gone out to Goro in the garden and, after saying her farewell to Sharpless, she returns to the living room. Goro is telling her something and she stops, changing her mind. Taking Goro by the back of the neck she drags him into the house.

Goro corrects what Suzuki said. ‘Dicevo… solo… che là in America quando un figliolo è nato maledetto trarrà sempre reietto la vita fra le genti!’ — I only said that over there in America, when a child is born cursed (mixed-race, as this opera means it), it will be rejected for life. He is, of course, telling the truth.

Director’s noteThis is why Suzuki resolves the child must not be taken to America.

Cio-Cio reacts, accusing Goro of lying. She says it first to herself, refusing what she knows is true. Only the last cry is turned on Goro, throwing the truth back at him to shut it out. Cio-Cio runs to the tokonoma, takes the gun that stands there and levels it at Goro. She drives him out of the room and he flees in fear.

Act II. Flower duet

A cannon sounds from the harbour. Pinkerton’s ship has arrived. Cio-Cio and Suzuki decorate the house with flowers to welcome him home.

Director’s noteThere are no real flowers on the stage, only light. Suzuki comes out with both arms full, exactly as the score asks. The two women scatter flowers with their bodies moving in the rhythm of the dance. But their hands are empty. The audience sees the movement, not the flowers. Instead the light changes. The whole stage fills with colour, white and violet, until the fragrance she sings about has become light and the empty stage feels as if it is covered in flowers. It is not the yellow of the wedding.

Flower duet: two women, empty hands, white and violet light

Act II. The night vigil

Night falls and the colour leaves the stage. To welcome Pinkerton, Cio-Cio wants to change into her wedding clothes. Suzuki goes to the cupboard to take out the Japanese robe.

As Suzuki is taking out the robe, Dolore follows her and picks up the butterfly specimen case from the alcove. Suzuki takes it from him and puts it up beside the gun. The child throws a tantrum for it, clinging to Suzuki and refusing to let go. Trying to calm him, Cio-Cio never manages to change her clothes. The child cries himself out and at last falls asleep at her feet. Suzuki puts the Japanese robe back into the cupboard.

The wordless humming chorus begins, not from the stage but from behind the audience, so the sound comes from all around, surrounding the auditorium. Worn out by Dolore, Cio-Cio sits beside him as he sleeps.

Director’s noteIn the original this scene has Cio-Cio waiting all night, still as a statue. The music is at its most peaceful, all the way through the humming chorus. In this production the staging is actually the opposite of stillness. What you hear is calm, but what you see is a mother worn out by her child. Dolore’s commotion runs on even inside the quiet of the humming chorus. Instead of a sublime woman standing through the night, we see a tired mother sitting beside her tired-out child.

Night: gun, flag and specimen on the high place where the shrine stood

Act III. Dawn and Pinkerton’s return

The night passes and morning comes. Cio-Cio picks up the child and carries him into the bedroom. Suzuki is left alone in the living room. Pinkerton, Sharpless and Kate enter the garden and knock on the door. Suzuki opens it and finds Pinkerton and Sharpless. The two men come into the living room but the woman, Kate, Pinkerton’s wife, stays in the garden. The door is left open so she is not backstage; rather she’s on our stage, watching everything through that open door and reacting to it.

In the garden Suzuki sees an unfamiliar woman and realises she is Pinkerton’s wife. Through the subsequent trio, while the two men avoid saying what must be said, she presses them, breaks down, gets up again and refuses. Suzuki has to dominate here. Pinkerton goes to the bedroom door, opens it slightly and looks at the sleeping Cio-Cio and the child. Then, having closed it, he sings his farewell to the house. ‘Farewell, flowering refuge.’

He leaves money with Sharpless, saying he cannot stay any longer, and quickly leaves the house. Kate sees him coming out into the garden but slips away, pretending she has neither seen nor heard any of it, and Pinkerton goes without even knowing she is there.

Act III. Kate

Kate stays in the garden and quietly asks Suzuki whether she will tell Cio-Cio what has happened, and says she will raise the child as her own. Suzuki bows her head and promises, then says that at this moment she needs to be alone with Cio-Cio.

Cio-Cio calls Suzuki from the bedroom. Kate moves back into the garden so that she cannot be seen. Cio-Cio comes into the living room believing Pinkerton has arrived and looks around for him. He is not there. Then Cio-Cio notices the woman out in the garden and realises who she is.

Cio-Cio says, ‘If he comes for the child himself, I will let him take the child. Tell him to come up the hill in half an hour.’ Kate and Sharpless leave. Cio-Cio is left alone, falls to the ground in tears, and Suzuki runs to help her.

Director’s noteKate enters wearing violet, the colour Cio-Cio filled the stage with while waiting for Pinkerton.

Act III. The end

Cio-Cio tells Suzuki to check on the child and take him outside to play. Suzuki brings the child from the bedroom to the door space (the audience has not seen them go out into the garden, so this space reads as the garden) and secretly watches what Cio-Cio does.

Director’s noteThe young adult Dolore returns to the cushion he sat on during the Prologue. There’s a second cushion for Suzuki, who will come and sit there later. The lighting is set so that the audience does not see him come in and sit. Only once he is in place does the light come up on him. From this moment the grown Dolore is watching this scene of his mother’s death.

Cio-Cio goes to the alcove and reads aloud what is written there. The Japanese scroll that has hung there throughout is revealed and for the first time the audience hears what it means. ‘If you cannot live with honour, die with honour.’

She puts on the mask that was beside the gun, which she then takes. After three years of living her life as if in the West, she is about to end her life in a Western way too. She puts the gun to her temple. The hand holding it will not stop shaking.

Suzuki pushes the child in through the open garden door. He runs in. Cio-Cio lowers the gun and gives him the American flag and the butterfly specimen he wanted the previous night. The child becomes completely absorbed in playing with it.

Here, an honourable death is not the Western gun but the Japanese sword, her father’s sword hidden inside the cloth. She tears through the cupboard for it. Only when the sword is in her hand does she become calm. She lifts the Japanese robe that comes out with the sword and puts it over her Western clothes. After living three years as a Westerner she has one last outer layer to add and it is a Japanese one.

Cio-Cio takes off the mask, removing three years as an American wife, and puts it in the alcove beside the gun. Now bare-faced and back to her own roots, she goes into her room and the door closes. The child is lost in his playing and the specimen breaks in his hands.

Cio-Cio in Western dress, mask in one hand, gun in the other

Cio-Cio goes into her room with the sword; the child with the broken specimen; a dandelion seedhead on the wall

Ending

After she pushes the child into the house, Suzuki goes out into the garden, where she sinks to the ground. Pinkerton arrives and goes into the living room. Suzuki follows him in. On the wall the dandelion seed head is perfect. Poised to release its seeds.

Pinkerton goes straight to Dolore, but the child is afraid of this stranger, whom he is seeing for the first time, and goes to Suzuki. Suzuki takes the child by the hand and goes to where the young adult Dolore is sitting. She sits down in the same place she took in the prologue. The young and older Dolore are together. On the screen one drifting dandelion seed reaches both of them, the child and the adult.

Meanwhile Pinkerton is alone. He stands over the American flag and the broken glass case on the floor and cries out towards the dead woman. ‘Butterfly’, the final cry of the opera. Pinkerton’s cry and the cry that opened the prologue now sound together — as the two anthems did at the start.