“I turn your morals upside down and set your spirit free,” Prince Orlofsky tells us in Die Fledermaus. His words are barbed, for in Johann Strauss II’s critique of hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure has its downside. The would-be adulterer Eisenstein unsuccessfully tries to pick up his own disguised wife, Rosalinde, at Orlofsky’s party, only to discover, by the cold light of day, that she’s been carrying on behind his back with her ex-lover Alfred. At the same bash, prison governor Frank tries his luck with the chambermaid – and aspiring actor – Adele and faces possible blackmail the following morning. For all its wit and humour, the operetta ends in a jail. As the hangovers kick in, comeuppances await.
Several directors, including Stephen Lawless at Glyndebourne and Christopher Alden at ENO, have of late explored the work’s darker resonances. Martin Lloyd-Evans’s new staging for Opera Holland Park follows suit, but is more cogent and successful than its predecessors. Lloyd-Evans relocates the piece from late 19th-century Vienna to 1930s London, where the Eisensteins’ fraught marriage has overtones of Noël Coward’s Private Lives, and where Adele seemingly has the run of their apartment when the couple’s backs are turned.
Orlofsky presides over a kind of multi-sexual jamboree, rendered furtive by everyone’s adoption of assumed identities. But the mirrored art deco walls of his ballroom are finally stripped away – in a rather cumbersome scene change – to reveal a supporting framework of cages hidden beneath. Things turn topical towards the end: in the jailer Frosch’s traditionally improvised monologue, we’re told that among those also confronting the consequences of their actions in his cells, are “Boris J”, Farage, Cameron and Gove.
It’s acerbically funny, rather sexy and superbly performed by one of those fine ensemble casts that Opera Holland Park always seems so good at assembling. Ben Johnson and Susanna Hurrell – husband and wife in real life – play the Eisensteins. He’s in splendid voice and attractively if ditheringly caddish. There’s a telling touch of cruelty in the way he treats Gavan Ring’s elegant Falke, whose resentment at a previous practical joke sets the narrative in motion. Hurrell, complete with a grandly adopted cut-glass accent, is all self-deceiving hauteur, and sounds gorgeous: her Czardas is a real high point. Lloyd-Evans is having nothing of the usual reconciliatory finale: this marriage is on the rocks by the end.
Jennifer France, meanwhile, makes a terrifically uppity Adele with her blazing high notes and pin-prick staccatos. Peter Davoren is the seedy, handsome-sounding Alfred. John Lofthouse reveals impeccable comic timing as Frank, and Samantha Price is the laconic Orlofsky, who, in one of the production’s many twists, turns out to be not quite what he seems. In the pit, John Rigby gets silky-smooth string tone and plenty of woodwind brio from the City of London Sinfonia. It’s provocative, engaging entertainment, and well worth seeing.
- At Opera Holland Park, London, until 5 August. Box office: 0300-999 1000.
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