We were warned. The Royal Opera, on the defensive after the scandal over a staged rape in Guillaume Tell last June, alerted patrons to scenes of explicit sex and violence in Katie Mitchell’s new production of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor.
Yes, it is certainly shocking but not gratuitously so — unless you think opera should be sanitised of the horrors of the real world.
Mitchell and inventive designer Vicki Mortimer show us, with a split stage, the bloody deeds usually perpetrated offstage. She adds an uncanonical miscarriage for Lucia (the pregnancy a result of a frenzied coupling with lover Edgardo) which partially accounts for the blood-stained state of her wedding dress.
The rest of the blood is that of the husband forced on her. Mitchell powerfully depicts the ecstasy of a woman experiencing real love for the first time in her life; every action, every instinct has previously been determined by the corseted patriarchal world of her brother and his billiards-playing friends.
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In her big Act 1 aria, Diana Damrau (aided by Daniel Oren’s measured conducting) vividly incarnates that erotic thrill both in her exquisitely ornamented vocal line and in the voluptuous writhing of her body.
Her later unhinged state, Mitchell proposes with acute perception, is the result of a traumatised woman driven to an act of desperation.
Damrau is a superbly expressive Lucia, though the production (which needs some refining) inevitably sacrifices some of the pyrotechnics.
Charles Castronovo is an ardent Edgardo and there are outstanding contributions from Ludovic Tézier and Kwangchul Youn.
At curtain-call, Mitchell was greeted predictably with boos as well as bravos. Health warnings in opera are a nonsense but sadly, it seems, still necessary.
Until May 19 (020 7304 4000); cinema broadcast Apr 25.
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