Faust Opera North, Grand Theatre, Leeds, review

When will opera directors wise up to the fact that simply translating something into a modern context doesn’t automatically open up resonance or relevance, let alone plausibility? Television audiences for Downton Abbey or Game of Thrones are given credit for a bit of historical imagination: why do opera audiences need to be spoon-fed interpretation?

This production of Gounod’s Faust, conceived by the stripling team of Rob Kearley and Ran Arthur Braun, is a case in point. Here is an opera rooted in the Victorian: a pantomime devil, and an innocent virgin seduced and ruined by a gentleman who gets away with it but learns remorse.

Although this situation has scant bearing on today’s moral priorities, it tells us much about the mid-19th-century mindset. But it appears to make Kearley and Braun antsy, so while leaving the text in the original French, they squeeze the scenario into a shape which reduces rather than expands its emotional force.

The set is made up of rolling screens, on to which is projected increasingly tiresome video (mostly shots of office blocks and agonized faces dissolving into ectoplasm). Against this restless backdrop, Faust becomes a Wall Street trader, about to jump from the parapet when Mephisto taps him on the shoulder. Valentin is standing for office on some right-wing ticket, hence his shame at his sister’s pregnancy. That’s about as coherent as it gets.

Marguerite’s coy gullibility makes no sense here, and suggesting that she falls victim to pro-lifers merely muddies the waters. Mephisto loses his melodramatic persona, Faust his status as a savant. The vital contrast between virtuous simplicity and amoral sophistication is flattened. It just won’t wash.

Peter Auty looks lumpen and had some trouble with the highest passages of his main aria, but he has the timbre and vocal weight for the title-role. Juanita Lascarro radiates unaffected sincerity as Marguerite, and James Creswell’s Mephisto is nicely black and baneful. Marcin Bronikowski’s Valentin is mediocre, but Robert Anthony Gardiner sings sweetly as a tenor Siébel and the chorus has fun with the big tunes.

Stuart Stratford conducts with keen relish of the score’s richness of texture and colour. Some of his textual decisions are eccentric, however, and I regret the excision of Marguerite’s aria “Il ne revient pas”.

But it’s the ghastly staging that torpedos the show: what a waste of what could have been a grand night out.

Until Nov 3, then touring Nottingham, Salford, Newcastle. Tickets (Leeds): 0844 848 2700