Die Fledermaus - review

It's 25 years since ENO's last new production of the best known of all Viennese operettas. That staging is still cherished by some for the sight of Lesley Garrett baring her bottom as Adele during the second act, but the new version of Die Fledermaus, directed by Christopher Alden, seems most unlikely to be remembered in a quarter of a century for any reason at all. It's a disappointingly unfunny, unsexy show.

Alden and designers Allen Moyer (sets) and Constance Hoffman (costumes) bring the action forward to Vienna in the 1920s, turning it into a paradigm of Freudian analysis, in which Orlofsky's party gives the bourgeois characters the opportunity to break out of their buttoned-up lives. Had the result been involving or entertaining that might have worked well, but when even two such experienced and instinctive stage creatures as Andrew Shore (Frank) and Tom Randle (Eisenstein) are unable to give their roles any real definition then the problems are clearly deep-seated.

Characterising the jailer Frosch (Jan Pohl) as an icily controlled, riot-stick wielding thug rather than the conventional drunk is clearly meant to give the whole work a dark, threatening subtext, but it just adds another inconsequential element to what is already a confused jumble of ideas.

Some musical sparkle might have helped too. But though the score moves along efficiently enough under Eun Sun Kim, diction is poor and none of the cast comes up with a show stopper. Julia Sporsén's Rosalind never seems quite to know who she is supposed to be, both Edgaras Montvidas's Alfred and Rhian Lois's Welsh-valleys Adele (in 1920s Vienna?) overdo their caricatures, and Jennifer Holloway's Orlofsky, thick Russian accent and all, fails to convince.