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Così Fan Tutte
Sexual cruelty … Così Fan Tutte. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian
Sexual cruelty … Così Fan Tutte. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

Così Fan Tutte review – fun but superficial spin on Mozart

This article is more than 9 years old
Coliseum, London
The ENO's new version of Mozart's opera is visually full-on, but loses sight of some of its disturbing emotional underpinning

Phelim McDermott: The wonderful thing about opera is you can never know what it might become.

Visually, English National Opera's new Così Fan Tutte pulls you straight into its funfair world from the first bar and rarely lets go. Circus performers, AKA the "skills ensemble", play tricks and gags and games in front of the curtain as the overture scurries beneath them. The opera's cynical sexual wager is settled in a tacky Bunny Club bar, while the later action unfolds busily against a 1950s Coney Island backdrop and in a sleazy motel, with revolving walls straight out of a French farce, while a troop of performers who seem to have wandered in from Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos look on. It's all done with bags of style and it's often a lot of fun.

It's hardly a new approach to Così, though. Peter Sellars, setting the opera in a Florida seaside diner, pioneered this sort of updating in the late 1980s, but unlike Phelim McDermott's new version, Sellars never lost focus on the sexual cruelty and emotional dysfunctionality that makes the opera so disturbing. That's the essential problem with McDermott's approach. Beneath the wit and style of the staging, with Jeremy Sams's translation a great success, it's a regression towards the early 20th-century patriarchal idea that Così is a light-hearted comedy of confusion.

There's so much to look at that Mozart's music sometimes seemed almost incidental. That may change later in the run and when this co-production with the Met moves to New York, where it should be more strongly cast. But Ryan Wigglesworth's conducting was bland, and vocal standards were inconsistent. The women were best, with Christine Rice's Dorabella the most substantial achievement, strongly characterised in ways that were missed elsewhere. Mary Bevan's Despina was bright and unflagging, but Kate Valentine's Fiordiligi, who sang her second act aria in a balloon, lacked the necessary last ounce of impact. Randall Bills struggled as Ferrando, and while Marcus Farnsworth has the presence for Guglielmo, he lacked the seductive tone the role requires. As Don Alfonso, Roderick Williams was extremely watchable but needed a bit more vocal heft – the whole show in microcosm, in fact.

Until 6 July. Box office: 020-7845 9300. Venue: Coliseum.

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