Trouble in Tahiti/A Quiet Place, Linbury Theatre review - top cast plays unhappy families

Most of us have been there: an impasse in a marriage, a bereavement in a dysfunctional family. Leonard Bernstein certainly had when he composed Trouble in Tahiti in 1952, basing the unhappy couple on his own parents and even the incipient problems in his own relationship with Felicia Montealegre (see the superb film Maestro), and 30 years later the sequel, A Quiet Place, when Felicia’s early death from cancer had left him unhappy and guilty.

Odd, then, that both works keep us emotionally at arm's length, either by stylisation (the one-acter, with the libretto by Bernstein in verse) or by going over the top (the blowsier form of A Quiet Place). Director Oliver Mears, his excellent singers and a very hard working, scaled-down Royal Opera Orchestra (individuals other than the leader uncredited in the too-short programme) under Nicholas Chalmers give it their best shot.

That still can't paper over all the problems with A Quiet Place, not least that even in Garth Edward Sutherland's adaptation it's at least 20 minutes too long and too repetitive, though undeniably fascinating and worthy of salvage. Bernstein wanted to give his own version of realistic American vernacular in using the wordy dialogue of Stephen Wadsworth, who also came to the project grieving over a death, his sister's in a car crash. But this production will do much to cement Trouble in Tahiti's rightful place as core repertoire. The UK rehabilitation began with Matthew Eberhardt's chameleonic, fantastical production for Opera North, assuring star status for Irish-Canadian mezzo Wallis Giunta (pictured above) and at least partial success at the Royal Opera. Entertainment value was paramount in Leeds, not least for the showstopping number "Island Magic", bringing in the other five members of the cast. That Mears can subject the first sight of a couple who can't communicate to a grimmer, more realistic treatment strengthens Bernstein's claim to immortality in his "little opry".

Opera North's version followed Janáček's Osud when I saw it, stunned to find that while the staging of the Czech's surrealist take on an unhappy marriage didn't work so well, the Bernstein was deeper and more serious underneath the wrappings than I'd thought. There was no need to set the scene for what Sam and Dinah would become decades later (in her case, after clearly worsened marital problems, a fatal end to a drink-driving excursion). Mears prepares for ties: his Dinah is already popping pills and hitting the bottle. In the brilliant and troubling reinvention of total singer-actor Giunta, this elegant and beautiful woman brushes up well to go out, evoking shades of Julianne Moore in Todd Haynes's Far from Heaven, but discreet wobbles undermine her assumed poise.

The jazz/scat trio who propose an ideal life in suburbia – Kirsty McLean, Peter Edge and Guy Elliott, more sinister than Opera North's lively participants in much of the action – don't appear in Dinah's alluring recitation of the "terrible, awful movie" she's just seen (Trouble in Tahiti, of course); here's it's a tipsy solo rampage. A double bed in which the 10-year-marrieds sleep apart – Dinah at one point in fetal position will be echoed by her adult son – eventually gets dismantled by Old Sam; 10-year old Junior appears at inopportune moments to see the alarming signs of his mother's distress and his parents' disharmony, paving the way for the bipolar disorder which afflicts his adult self in A Quiet Place. Henry Neill (pictured above with Sarah Pring as Mrs Doc, Rowan Pierce as Dede and Elgan Llŷr Thomas as François) has the toughest job of the evening, playing both the father in the first opera and the son in the second: is this a first? If so, Mears is to be applauded, and Neill carries off the double-act with aplomb, even if the paternal role goes a bit low for him. Young Sam's macho posturing at the gym – the character needs a good body to carry off his boasts – goes hand in glove with a not-overdone attraction to a silhouette of a naked man showering. Why not? That would explain further the alienation between the married couple. Is Junior's gayness anything to do with the lost language of cranes, and is Old Sam so repelled by him because of his own closeted existence?

For a revision which he eventually conducted at the Vienna State Opera, Bernstein wove Trouble in Tahiti into the second act of A Quiet Place. Having it first is better in so many ways, not least the fact that the audience may pick up on themes briefly rising to the surface in A Quiet Place's first act, namely the disjunction motif of the couple right at the beginning of the later, longer work and the craving for "a quiet place" of a garden which is so moving in Trouble and equally poignantly placed reminiscence-wise in the later work.

Mercifully we're spared a snuff movie of Dinah's crash at the start: torches search out the smashed-up car, then deftly, thanks to Annemarie Woods' designs, Fabiano Piccioli's lighting and Sarah Fahie's movement, we're transported to the funeral parlour where Dinah's coffin is central. Bernstein has virtuoso fun with the weave of platitudes and sorrow, dodecaphony and snatches of popular music, and this large company, with well-drawn characterisations from Nick Pritchard as Funeral Director and Robin Bailey as Analyst, is razor-sharp. Even so, you wonder, once the piece becomes a family four-hander, if the ensemble stretch is worth it, and it's all quite drainingly loud in the Linbury (even in Trouble in Tahiti, the orchestra can be overpowering). In the scenes to come, Bernstein remains unashamedly big-operatic in his writing; it would be good to see further work, a second interval and a transfer to the Royal Opera House's main stage in a hoped-for revival. If Neill is now totally different (and superb) as the unstable son whose Act One striptease is a sign of manic disorder evolving musically into a leading motif of the need for love underneath, Grant Doyle as Old(er) Sam takes up the gauntlet in resonant style (Doyle pictured above second from left with Neill, Rowan Pierce and Elgan Llŷr Thomas). It's not his fault if Bernstein's first major monologue for him feels overblown – you can see Lenny himself not quite real in his excessive grief. The perhaps too-quick rapprochement with his children includes the touching bedroom conversation at the beginning of Act Two with the daughter who arrived after the action of Trouble in Tahiti, Dede – a totally lovely performance from Rowan Pierce.

Elgan Llŷr Thomas is the perfect tenor lead as François, the Québécois who fell in love with Junior and now manages his partner's mental illness through marriage to Dede. Is it a cop-out of Bernstein, always cagey about his homosexuality, that François ends up making love to Dede? How will this ménage à trois continue to function? And isn't it too much that François, reading a hitherto sealed letter from Dinah, suggests that she sacrificed herself so the other three members of the family could be happy? The trouble in this suburbia is that we begin to believe in real moments of discord and happiness only to have Bernstein and Wadsworth blow it by phoney gestures. There are at least two false endings; the real one is convincing. It's a long haul, and demanding on the audience; but there's no doubt it was worth doing, and well overdue.

• At the Royal Opera's Linbury Theatre until 24 October
• David Nice is currently covering Trouble in Tahiti and A Quiet Place on his Zoom Opera in Depth course
• More opera reviews on theartsdesk