Eugene Onegin at Scottish Opera, review - crackling with vitality

There’s nothing very complex about Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin: it tells a readily recognised story of adolescent infatuation and its ironies through music that wears its heart on its sleeve - a combination quite rich enough to satisfy most of us. But to an ambitious young director like Oliver Mears, such romantic simplicity is a red rag: he feels impelled to make his mark by roughing it up and scumbling its primary emotional colours.

His big idea for this Scottish Opera production isn’t particularly original - it was more elaborately developed in Kasper Holten’s recent Covent Garden version - nor is it illuminating. An elderly mute Tatyana (Rosy Sanders) prowls the stage throughout, wondering miserably at the follies of her youthful self: since her clothes suggest the 1960s and the setting is otherwise located in the late 19th century, we must assume that the horrors of the Russian revolution have intervened - except that Tchaikovsky was long dead when those events occurred and the opera’s theme is clearly remorse rather than memory. This mute figure is only a distraction from the simple immediacy of the drama.

Mears has cooked up other daft interpolations as well: Onegin makes his first appearance astride a magnificent clip-clopping horse (at a previous performance, this beast had caused a comic sensation by depositing a quantity of dung) and later is even more gratuitously glimpsed standing naked in a bath (Tatyana’s fantasy? Oh please). More’s the pity, because in many respects his direction is quietly sensitive to character - for example, in presenting the Onegin of the last act as mentally unstable, framed by attractive designs by Annemarie Woods and Fabiana Piccioli, and sensibly divided by two intervals indicative of significant lapses of time.