Don Giovanni, ENO, Coliseum, review

Rufus Norris has cleared away a lot of the clutter from his 2010 production of Don Giovanni. Gone are the electric crackles during the overture, along with most of the other references to the original central idea of the Don as an “electric” presence.

The show seems a great deal less hyperactive and less unsure of itself. But, with less going on, it becomes even clearer that Norris doesn’t have much to say about Mozart’s opera.

It remains a determinedly tawdry affair – if there’s any eroticism at all, it’s decidedly that of the pub car park rather than the hotel suite. There’s little sense of location – either physical or chronological – and we veer between a grim retro past and vaguely dystopian future. Ian MacNeil provides movable blocks of scenery, which, slid about by the Don’s masked minions, help keep the action fluid. Nicky Gillibrand, however, seems to have simply raided the ENO dress-up box for her costume designs – and, one imagines, a teenager’s bedroom for Giovanni’s grotty, oh-so-subversive messiah T-shirt.

But the production is also severely undermined by Jeremy Sams’s translation, which is alarmingly unsure of its register: one moment it’s colloquial, the next we’re expected to believe that Elvira’s juiciest insult is “You libertine!”. In his pursuit of comedy, Sams piles on the glib couplets thick and fast, but with each one I felt my ability to care about Giovanni being gradually eroded. The subtly (and cynically) rewritten Serenade makes a last-ditch bid for sympathy, but by the time we got to the ineptly realised damnation, well, I couldn’t give a damn.

Iain Paterson returns to sing with cultivated smoothness as the Don, but he is fatally short on the charisma, sexiness and nobility the character needs. As his greasy, creepy Leporello, Darren Jeffery sounds rough and underpowered. Ben Johnson brings elegance and style to Don Ottavio, but Katherine Broderick now seems uncomfortable reining in her big, bright voice for the more florid demands of Donna Anna. Sarah Redgwick repeats her impressive Donna Elvira, and Sarah Tynan her spirited Zerlina. John Molloy remains an attractive Masetto, Matthew Best a granite-like Commendatore.

In the pit, Edward Gardner conducts with unloving, hard-driven efficiency, drawing glossy but anonymous playing from the ENO orchestra. I left dispirited, with a paradoxical conviction that while the streamlined production is not as bad as it was, it doesn’t seem much better either.

Until Nov 17. Tickets: 020 7845 9300; eno.org