Arts & Culture
Ketchup and confusion
Published 18 June 2001
Music - Patrick O'Connor longs for the final curtain of ENO's muddled Don Giovanni
The moment an opera producer brings a motor car on stage, you know there's trouble ahead. In this most artificial of all theatrical forms, the attempt at realism has the effect not of clarifying, but of obscuring the action. Calixto Bieito's new production of Don Giovanni opens with a tawdry joke, in which the car drives down to the footlights to reveal a personalised number plate - CO TORE 1 (Commendatore). Leporello's line, "I think I hear someone coming", is timed to reveal a couple in the back seat, Giovanni and Anna. They emerge into bright light so that later in the act, when she is supposed to "recognise" him, the point is lost or ignored.
The action takes place in and around a modern disco, with the stage dominated by a bank of floodlights, as if for a football match. The characters are given modish contemporary details. Donna Elvira (Claire Weston) is a compulsive eater, a familiar trope for sexual frustration. (But does no one know how to eat a slab of chocolate at English National Opera? You break it up, finger by finger, not stuff it sideways into your mouth.) Donna Anna (Claire Rutter) is a spoilt brat in animal-print designer gear, while Zerlina (Linda Richardson) and Masetto (Leslie John Flanagan) are a yuppie couple in gaudy hired-out wedding finery. Giovanni (Garry Magee) and Leporello (Nathan Berg) are a pair of football louts.
Somewhere, there may be something to be said about the role-playing sexual games of our own time replacing the hierarchical machinations of Da Ponte's plot. In an essay in the ENO programme, Michael Willing writes that if there is "a Giovanni in everybody, then there is also a need to destroy him". The final scene shows the characters doing just that, binding Don Giovanni to a chair and repeatedly stabbing him. By then, all the personalities have become blurred, everybody is violent, drunk or drugged. I lost count of the number of people who emerged with tomato ketchup smeared around their faces. All the women grope at the men's trousers; at one point Zerlina and Elvira kiss, then Elvira assaults Leporello with her trainers. None of this is in the least bit shocking or stimulating. Furniture, food and drink are constantly thrown about. A man with a video camera films the wedding scene, and the tape plays on Giovanni's television during the final scene.
There have been many great interpretations of operas that have illuminated the text and music, sometimes using updated settings, historical, political or abstract images. Everything in this Giovanni, though, is merely decoration. Compared with, say, Ruth Berghaus's staging for Welsh National Opera in 1994 or David Freeman's 1991 Opera Factory version, Bieito's ideas seem just like a grab bag of trendy stills from popular cinema. Joseph Swensen drives a performance from the pit that is fast and hard - under the circumstances, it is difficult to see what else he could do - but there were serious defects in the ensemble, with the singers looking nervously in his direction. Only Claire Rutter as Anna and Paul Nilon as Ottavio manage to salvage a little vocal grace in their Act Two arias. Garry Magee, who is an experienced exponent of the title role, seemed a pale caricature.
Don Giovanni is a comedy about sacred and profane love; its message is still relevant and strong, and has no need of this sort of tabloid nonsense. Even the most unsophisticated audiences would quickly be able to draw their own parallels.
Never have I longed so much for the final curtain. It is only fair to add that there was some laughter and a good deal of applause at the end, with the inevitable boos and catcalls from on high.
Don Giovanni is at ENO, London Coliseum, St Martin's Lane, London WC2 (020 7632 8300), until 6 July
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