Leonard Bernstein’s opera of suburbia

Formica table and matching chairs: in a flash, these humble items of furniture conjure 1950s suburbia in all its wipe-clean, affordable modernity. They took centre stage in Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti (1952), half of a double bill with Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine (1958) in a new staging by Daisy Evans for Buxton international festival, conducted by Iwan Davies and designed by Loren Elstein. This was one of seven new productions – including four premieres under the heading “Shorts” – at this established but burgeoning event in the Peak District spa town.

Whatever our long view of that moment of postwar optimism, the potent fantasy of a little white house “out of the hubbub / Less than an hour by train” still resonates. Even with the dream still fresh, Bernstein saw beyond its perfect veneer. This is a bleak work. Sam and Dinah – stylishly sung by Charles Rice and Hanna Hipp – have been married for a decade. Where, they wonder, mostly privately, has that early romance gone? Dinah pops pills and spends lonely afternoons at the movies. Sam fine-tunes his manhood by going to the gym – or here, arguably more enjoyably, peels off a woman’s stockings in a bedroom.

Typically mixing wit and heart, Bernstein wrote his own libretto, later adding a cumbersome sequel, A Quiet Place, which takes its title from Dinah’s yearning aria in Tahiti. In addition to the two solo roles, a trio of close-harmony scat singers – Chloé Hare-Jones, Harun Tekin, Ross Cumming – provide a foot-tapping, catchy Greek chorus. Their crooning inventory of the joys of suburbia offsets Sam and Dinah’s emotional outpourings. On the first night, some of the orchestral ensemble could have been crisper, the music’s twists and angles sharper, but the mood of hope deferred was nicely caught.

In La Voix Humaine, Evans laid bare some of the unstated aspects of the text, in which we hear a woman, Elle – the brilliantly inventive Allison Cook – singing down the telephone to her former lover. What is true, and what imagined, is unclear. Evans’s interpretation, while diluting the intensity of a solitary figure on stage, added context and, through giving the Tahiti cast silent acting roles, turned the double bill into an ensemble show. Elstein’s designs, which also took a few cues from Edward Hopper (lighting by Jake Wiltshire), were cleverly flipped so that the bedroom in Tahiti became Elle’s lonely prison, all pink satin and boudoir lamps. Cook’s energy – she is also singing in Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet at Buxton – as well as her versatility, are admirable.

Eyes, staring, ogling, are everywhere in Salome (1905), Richard Strauss’s opera based on Oscar Wilde’s play, spun from a few lines in the Bible about a dancing girl who demanded John the Baptist’s head on a plate. The salivating Herod lusts after his stepdaughter with “mole’s eyes”.