Idomeneo review – Mozart's tale of a crisis in Crete looks and sounds good but lacks edge

Mozart’s Idomeneo is full of irreconcilable opposites: good v evil, peace v war, love v duty. So far, so Enlightenment. Tim Albery’s striking new production for Garsington Opera adds another opposition into the mix: then and now.

Hannah Clark’s designs see late 18th-century aristo-wear (for the trio of entangled lovers) appear alongside the sturdy knits, beanie hats, overalls and wellingtons of modern fishermen’s attire. In this particular post-Trojan war Crete, ancien regime furnishings turn up like historical flotsam on a stage dominated by two large shipping containers – one balanced at a precipitous angle and used as a separate dramatic space, the other partially buried – and a modern photo projection of a distant shoreline, its colours shifting subtly as the late afternoon faded outside. Malcolm Rippeth’s lighting designs also exploit the changing ambient conditions, gradually intensifying a contrast between warm, period lighting from candles inside the main container and industrial bleached-out starkness outside it. In true Enlightenment style, the ending brought a resolution of all-over brightness – though no equivalent compromise was reached on the costuming.

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Powerful theatrical pictures abound. One, in which both the lover and the father of Idamante (condemned to be sacrificed to appease Neptune) are revealed in the shipping container, motionless and horror-stricken, had the proportions and poignancy of a reworked Vermeer. But in an opera set in the Mediterranean, with its story of war, shipwreck and refugees, the production has surely missed an opportunity to offer a sharper critique. Its attractiveness makes the vague references to the current crisis in southern Europe – orange life jackets and those containers – uncomfortable viewing. Not least because the “refugees” here were clad in standard-issue operatic once-white rags. Without that political edge, Albery’s staging risks offering symbolism of the least thought-provoking sort: the shipping container is simply a convenient way to have a changing space within a single set; the refugee crisis a sign we’re in modern Crete. In other words, let’s not spoil the dinner interval.

The performances supplied the human empathy lacking elsewhere. Streamlined by well-judged cuts, conductor Tobias Ringborg’s reading was emotionally intense. The orchestra was excellent, its ensemble tightly controlled, the sound country-house deluxe; the chorus supplied vast reserves of energy. Much of the solo singing was also good. From the moment he rolled on to the stage, exhausted by shipwreck, Toby Spence’s Idomeneo was a sympathetic, fallible King of Crete, his earthy tenor achieving a moving delicacy in the opera’s closing scene of abdication and celebration. As his son Idamante, Caitlin Hulcup sounded uncomfortable in the role’s upper reaches but was dramatically convincing as the frock-coated young lover. Rebecca von Lipinski’s Elettra was a sort of punk aristocrat who raged, wheedled and cried her way through her unrequited position in the love triangle – and such exuberance was irresistible. Best of all was Louise Alder’s Ilia, the Trojan princess accidentally besotted with the enemy. Her light, flexible soprano was ideally suited to the role and venue, her ornamentation lucid, her tone flawless.