Don Giovanni – review

Kasper Holten's new production of Don Giovanni plays its trump card before the overture has even ended. As the names in Leporello's catalogue proliferate like ivy over the facades of Es Devlin's set, it's clear that this is going to be an evening of technological virtuosity, and that Luke Halls' video designs are going to figure very prominently.

At that stage, though, it's impossible to imagine just how prominently, or that the slick precision with which Halls' images are projected onto every surface, sometimes adding just a wash of colour, sometimes imprisoning a character in an Escher-like labyrinth of patterns, will be the lasting memory of what is otherwise an unremarkable staging. Visual effects turn out to be everything. Anja Vang Kragh's costumes often look sumptuous, but they are hard to fix either chronologically or in social terms – Masetto (Dawid Kimberg) looks straight out of PG Wodehouse; his wedding party could be from a Hardy novel – and in an opera that is as much about class as it is about a sexual predator, knowing where everything is taking place and who the characters really are is crucially important.

Those characters, though, remain opaque, and their relationships seem barely defined. There are occasional glimmers of ideas – Malin Byström's Anna is obsessed with Mariusz Kwiecień's Giovanni and goes off to screw him while Ottavio (Antonio Poli) is singing Dalla Sua Pace; Elizabeth Watts's sober Zerlina tears her own clothes during the first-act finale as if to suggest that Giovanni has attempted to rape her – but none of them is consistent or explained. And nothing is resolved at the end of the opera, which is drastically truncated. Rather than being dragged away to any kind of hell, Giovanni is left alone on stage after the Commendatore's appearance, and the music cuts straight to the final ensemble, which is sung from the wings. The other characters and their futures have been discarded and only Giovanni remains, apparently untouched.

It's a final abdication of dramatic responsibility in an evening when Nicola Luisotti's conducting is lethargic at times, so that there is no more fizz in the music than in the drama, and the singing is uneven too. The best, most stylish delivery comes from Kwiecień, who is certainly dashing, though not threatening, and from Véronique Gens as a haughty Elvira, while, as Leporello, Alex Esposito gets little from the production to work with. That's the fundamental problem: take away the striking technical wizardry and what's left is neither sexy nor funny, let alone dangerous.