UK Edition
Review
This is a striking, if ultimately unsatisfying, Don Giovanni – review
There’s so much that is striking and thoughtful about Richard Jones’s new production of Don Giovanni that I’m surprised the taste it leaves is so unsatisfying.
Everything is vividly defined from the overture onwards, when a drop curtain depicting Giovanni’s mugshot on a “Wanted” poster rises to reveal the corridor of a seedy flop-house hotel. Here our hero stands, mechanically prepared to service a succession of women who can’t walk past without offering themselves. Each sexual encounter lasts only seconds; Leporello gets off on peering through the keyhole.
Anna and Giovanni are involved in a sado-masochistic game when the Commendatore abandons his own illicit tryst and bursts in, ending up stabbed in the genitals. Giovanni remains a ruthless psychotic throughout, Leporello a mere craven opportunist. Elvira, Ottavio, Zerlina and Masetto are mere caricatures. And so it goes on, nasty and brutish, with dog eating dog right up to the final scene where Jones delivers an explosively clever surprise that I mustn’t spoil.
Yet although the pace remains admirably swift and the action is slickly executed, reducing the opera to the dimensions of a Mickey Spillane dime paperback short-changes its emotionally complex tragi-comedy.
None of the tenderness or sincerity in Mozart’s score registers: the effect is unrelievedly bleak and heartless, and despite some brilliantly witty touches (Anna and Ottavio communicating by telephone, for instance), Jones tellingly fills in the gaps by making recourse to old tricks (such as the silent Doppelgänger or the robotic chorus) that he’s used once too often elsewhere. Here is a director struggling with an opera that he doesn’t really like or understand. (I sympathise; I’m not sure I do either.)
There are some distinguished performances. As Elvira, Christine Rice sings a magnificent “Mi tradi”. Allan Clayton is a richly honeyed Ottavio. Clive Bayley is both deeply sinister and madly funny as Leporello. Mary Bevan would be an enchanting Zerlina had the production allowed it, and Nicholas Crawley makes a strong mark as Masetto.
The two slight disappointments are Caitlin Lynch – yet another of those American sopranos with which ENO is so besotted and not quite mistress of Anna’s exigent arias – and Christopher Purves, whose Giovanni is doomed to be so viciously unpleasant that he does not charm or engage.
Mark Wigglesworth conducts the excellent orchestra in a fleet, light-touch account of the score – what a pity that his long-term relationship with ENO didn’t work out.
Until 26 October; Box office: 020 7845 9300