Bleak, nasty and brutish – save for a few brilliantly witty touches
Don Giovanni ENO, London Coliseum
There’s so much that is striking and thoughtful about Richard Jones’s new production of Don Giovanni that I’m surprised it leaves such an unsatisfying taste. Everything is vividly defined from the overture onwards, when a drop curtain depicting Giovanni 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. 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 ruthlessly psychotic throughout, Leporello a mere craven opportunist. Elvira, Ottavio, Zerlina and Masetto are just caricatures. And so it goes on, nasty and brutish, right up to the final scene where Jones delivers an explosively clever surprise that I mustn’t spoil.
Yet although the pace remains swift and the action is slick, reducing the opera to the dimensions of a Mickey Spillane 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 fills in the gaps by making recourse to old tricks (the silent Doppelganger, 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 sinister and funny as Leporello; Mary Bevan would be an enchanting Zerlina had the production allowed it, and Nicholas Crawley makes a strong Masetto.
The two slight disappointments are Caitlin Lynch – one of those American sopranos with which ENO is so besotted – and Christopher Purves, whose Giovanni is so unpleasant that he does not charm or engage.
Mark Wigglesworth conducts the excellent orchestra in a fleet, lighttouch account of the score – what a pity that his long-term relationship with ENO didn’t work out.
Until Oct 26; tickets: 020 7845 9300; eno.org