A Don Giovanni who’s as sexy as Voldemort
WITH great music and a brilliant libretto, Don Giovanni ought to be fireproof, but the ENO company make it as unattractive as possible. Even the orchestra is sometimes almost inaudible in the London Coliseum acoustic.
The set — revolting olive-green walls with brown doors everywhere — is as alluring as a station waiting room. Singers keep going through the doors and the walls keep moving, so the music competes with trundling wheels. The costumes are as dull as the rest.
Producer Richard Jones, one of a number of operatic illiterates who seemingly cannot read a libretto, gives us every modish cliche, including characters who Stand Around Symbolically.
There are witty moments — and boy are they needed! But Jones’s alterations to the beginning and ending add a further layer of cynicism to an already cynical opera. His Don Giovanni, Christopher Purves, looks more like a cross between Lord Voldemort and Mussolini than a Warren Beatty-style stud. Clive Bayley as Leporello, resembling a smug City trader rather than a comic servant, lacks the touch, so even his funniest lines sound like the Shipping Forecast. Mary Bevan sings charmingly as Zerlina and Allan Clayton, while as ineffectual as most Don Ottavios, does his arias well. Caitlin Lynch and Christine Rice are dramatically involved but shrill. James Creswell, a dry Commendatore, redeems himself at the close.