Caligula, ENO, Coliseum, review

First, a warning. Anyone seeing the name Caligula and hoping to be shocked and appalled by a wanton display of orgiastic mayhem will be bitterly disappointed: one comely nude and some Folies-Bergères chorines is as titillating as it gets. In every other respect, this is a production at which even your starchiest maiden aunt won’t bat an eyelid – in fact, she’s more likely to drop off.

The music is the work of Detlev Glanert, a German composer in his early fifties, little known in Britain, although he has been featured at the Proms. A pupil of Hans Werner Henze, he stands in a humanistic tradition that rejects Expressionist and serialist extremes, basing itself instead in a relatively conservative sonic language.

Caligula is his 10th work for the theatre, first performed in 2006 and here receiving its British première. It’s based on the play by Albert Camus, written in the pre-war years during which Mussolini, Stalin and Hitler were appropriating monstrous levels of unchecked personal power.

In its time, it seemed a stark warning of the dangers of totalitarianism. But today all that looks like stale buns, and director Benedict Andrews seems uninterested in exploring political resonances.

He sets the piece in a stadium, filling the stage with steep seating. Eliminating any hint of militarism or repression, he offers no explanation of how this Caligula enforces his tyranny: is he intended to represent that all-too-familiar figure of our dismal celebrity culture, the showbiz mogul?

In the role, Peter Coleman-Wright gamely leers, snarls, strips and goes potty in drag, but the fundamental dramatic problem is that he appears as capriciously crazy at the opera’s beginning as he does at its conclusion, and in the intervening two hours his character neither deepens nor broadens. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and comes to a sticky end. But we knew that already.

Glanert’s music, conducted by Ryan Wigglesworth, is clinically efficient and precise, as if composed with a scalpel. Sparely and tautly scored, it allows most of Amanda Holden’s translation to be clearly audible, and dutifully rises to some lyrical episodes and rousing climaxes. Yet it doesn’t seduce or enthrall: I kept imagining the alluring tapestry that the Strauss of Salome would have woven out of the scenario.

The performance is first-class, with Yvonne Howard particularly arresting as Caligula’s wife. But I found the whole thing crashingly obvious and unedifying.

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