Orpheus in the Underworld review – balloons for tutus and jarring tragedy

‘Heaven is overrated. Hell is where the party’s at.” That’s the publicity line for Emma Rice’s new production of Orpheus in the Underworld at English National Opera. It’s only partly true, unless your idea of a party is the sort of thing that gets your picture on the wall at the CID. On the face of it, this show is the light relief in ENO’s four-opera Orpheus season. Offenbach’s operetta satirised Gluck’s opera (which opened here earlier in the week), with its lofty classical story of true lovers. What if, instead, Orpheus and Eurydice were that sitcom staple, the married couple grown sick of each other?

It’s not 1858 any more, thank God, and Rice might be right to find that Offenbach’s original version – the “happy ending” of which has awful Eurydice passed from god to god like a hand-me-down, while her equally objectionable husband gets off scot-free – unworkable as a modern comedy. But her solutions introduce jarring notes of tragedy that weigh the whole thing down.

First, as we see in a backstory overture, Orpheus and Eurydice are just a nice young couple, and what has sent them reeling is the death of their child. The flowers spelling “BABY” on the hearse are a huge misjudgment, and it’s no surprise that the comedy aspect of the evening takes quite a while to recover. When will it be OK to laugh again? Will there be a signal?

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There is, of sorts, with the entrance of Alex Otterburn’s campy, confident Pluto in disguise, looking jolly pleased with himself – as he should do, having managed to pull with that haircut. In fact, there are lots of good comic lines in Rice and Tom Morris’s English reworking of the text, and some lovely touches in the staging thanks to Lizzie Clachan’s simple but striking designs – the white-balloon sheep, the buzzing bees. The ENO chorus as clouds, with white bodysuits and white-balloon tutus, are quite glorious. The heaven surrounded by those clouds is a poolside dream so boring the gods want to sleep through it.

So far, so Offenbach. But hell is a nightmare, a grubby peep-show world populated by men in dirty macs. Pluto is effectively a trafficker, Eurydice his victim, and when she sings the Infernal Galop – the tune everyone knows as the Can-Can – it’s a song of desperate defiance. The ending isn’t happy for anyone, and neither is it particularly satisfying for the audience. And, for this story, Offenbach would have written different music.

The main roles are well sung, with Ed Lyon as Orpheus and Mary Bevan lighting up the stage as Eurydice. The gods, led by Willard White’s philandering Jupiter, sometimes need more directorial help – in particular ENO newcomer Idunnu Münch, who has a lovely soprano but needs to get down to the footlights and really sell Diana’s smutty aria. Down in Hades, Alan Oke is wonderfully horrible as leery John Styx. Baritone Lucia Lucas, the first transgender singer on a major London opera stage, is affable as Public Opinion, here a London cabbie, but is stymied by the non-comic opening.

The orchestra play well for Sian Edwards, but there’s not quite enough sparkle in the pit – nor, ultimately, on stage. This is Rice’s first opera, and I’d like to see her direct another, but only if she’s given material to work with that she doesn’t want to fight.