Lively and resonant despite its daft tweaks
Eugene Onegin
Theatre Royal Glasgow
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, 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 Sixties 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 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. Natalya Romaniw’s Tatyana is vocally an interpretation of world class, ardent in expression and expansive in phrase; a little less sulkiness, a little more vulnerability in the early scenes wouldn’t come amiss. She is well matched to Samuel Dale Johnson’s dashingly handsome Onegin, his manner just the wrong side of smug and his singing elegantly polished.
Peter Auty makes a plangent Lensky, delivering his aria full throttle, and Sioned Gwen Davies is an exuberant Olga. Lesser roles are all crisply taken, and the ad hoc chorus, singing from behind a scrim, sounds fervent. The conducting of Scottish Opera’s music director Stuart Stratford, expert in the Russian repertory, renders the score’s deeper swell as well as its passing delicacies. Despite outbreaks of directorial nonsense, this is an Onegin crackling with vitality.
Until May 5, then touring until May 31. Tickets (Glasgow): 0844 871 7647; scottishopera.org.uk