Pulling the wings off ‘Butterfly’

THERE are no gang rapes, only two murders, and a whole 15 minutes elapse before the first onstage fellatio.

But the wrong two people die, there’s plenty of violence, and everyone drinks himself stupid in Spanish director Calixto Bieito’s take on Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly,” which opened last week at Berlin’s Komische Oper.

The 42-year-old Bieito’s opera stagings are typically crammed with degrading sexual acts and drenched in bodily fluids. His last production for the Komische Oper, Mozart’s “Abduction From the Seraglio,” featured real prostitutes, urine and a pair of severed nipples. So it comes as no surprise that he reads “Madame Butterfly” (1904), the story of Japanese 15-year-old Cio-Cio San, child bride of U.S. sailor Pinkerton, as a parable of sex tourism and economic exploitation.

“I know plenty of people who go to the Third World to pay for sex,” he told a news conference just before the premiere. “One of my best friends does. It’s not necessarily a bad thing.”

In Bieito’s staging, though, it’s not a good thing for Pinkerton. He returns at the end of the opera to find that his abandoned bride has slashed their child’s throat and slaughtered her maid, Suzuki, with a samurai sword. In the original, it’s only herself whom Butterfly kills.

Also in this version, Butterfly’s uncle the Bonze is a drunken war veteran who molested her when she was a child. The U.S. consul Sharpless likes young girls as well and still abuses Butterfly whenever he can.

Suzuki, meanwhile, is used by everyone, including Butterfly, whose only goals in life are money and escape. And while Sharpless may sing with warmth of his pity for the forsaken Butterfly, Bieito has him blindfold her and force her hand down his trousers. Later, while she sings a lullaby to her child, he has her carving blood from the boy’s throat.