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The Tales of Hoffmann: Barry Banks as Hoffmann and Georgia Jarman as Olympia
Schoolboy crush on Sleeping Beauty ... Barry Banks as Hoffmann and Georgia Jarman as Olympia in The Tales of Hoffmann. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian
Schoolboy crush on Sleeping Beauty ... Barry Banks as Hoffmann and Georgia Jarman as Olympia in The Tales of Hoffmann. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

The Tales of Hoffmann – review

This article is more than 12 years old
Coliseum, London

Richard Jones's new English National Opera production of Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann is a thing of paradoxes. It achieves greatness in some places and doesn't work in others, though its unevenness reflects problems surrounding the piece itself – above all, the editorial nightmare that dogs it.

The score remained unfinished at Offenbach's death in 1880. Most productions use a version subsequently prepared by the composer Ernest Guiraud, which remains controversial for its drastic alterations to the original conception – in particular to the running order not just of individual numbers, but of entire acts. ENO, however, have opted for a new critical edition by Michael Kaye and Jean-Christophe Keck, which solves some problems but creates others.

The shape of the opening scenes and the role of Nicklausse, Hoffmann's rationalist sidekick, are vastly strengthened by the restoration of previously excised material. But without Guiraud's reworkings, the Giulietta episode – now placed last rather than second – seems curiously sketchy and anti-climactic after all that has gone before.

Jones's inspiration, meanwhile, tends to follow the quality of the music, rather than compensate for its occasional deficiencies. His approach is surreal, which also hampers things a bit. Offenbach's Hoffmann is an alcoholic writer gradually losing his grip on reality as he tells three supposedly autobiographical tales to fellow drinkers in a Nuremberg pub. Jones, however, confines the action to the interior of a tawdry 1950s studio flat, where all pretensions to reason have long since vanished, and Hoffmann's audience, emerging through walls and out of furniture, is as imaginary as the tales themselves.

His narratives are played out in distorted versions of the same room, and all three, in typical Jones fashion, are richly allusive. The Olympia scenes depict a schoolboy crush on Disney's Sleeping Beauty. Femme fatale Giulietta looks like Amy Winehouse, which is inappropriate. The Antonia episode, though, nodding at classic horror movies from Lugosi's Dracula to early Cronenberg, is the stuff of genius and absolutely petrifying.

It sounds wonderful, too. Barry Banks's Hoffmann is all ringing top notes and ecstatic self-delusion. In accordance with Offenbach's much-flouted wishes, Hoffmann's four loves are played by the same soprano (Georgia Jarman) and the four villains by the same bass (Clive Bayley, splendidly sinister). Jarman seems ill at ease as Giulietta, but is sensational elsewhere. Bayley is faultless, as is Christine Rice's tremendous schoolboy Nicklausse. It's finely conducted by Antony Walker, too.

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