Bringing out the darkness of the Don
Don Giovanni Festival Theatre
Hungarian conductor Iván Fischer raised a few eyebrows at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2015 with his stripped-back Marriage of Figaro, which he both conducted and directed, and which mixed orchestra and singers on stage to memorable and humorous effect.
He’s back this year, again as both conductor and director, for Don
Giovanni. But this is a far darker affair – at times literally, with bare spotlights illuminating only small patches of stage for frustratingly lengthy sections. Fischer’s conceit is that we’re seeing the world through the eyes of the Don. And it’s a world of bodies, bodies, bodies – most of them young and fit, courtesy of actors from Budapest’s University of Theatre and Film Arts, who also double up as the chorus. Fischer dispenses with a set, replacing it with his corps of 16 young actors, who gather in formations or strike perilously unstable poses to represent settings.
Does it work? Well, yes and no. There are some excellent set pieces – notably an elaborate dinner table for the opera’s climactic scene involving face-up girls balanced precariously on the backs of facedown boys, legs jutting in all directions. And the Don being dragged down to hell amid a sea of writhing human hands is a memorable image of his demise.
Elsewhere, however, Fischer’s bodies conceit feels little more than decorative. The result is a production that’s quite flat, at times static, and one that at certain moments could even be confused with a concert performance. What Fischer’s bare-stage, strippedback approach does, however, is to throw focus firmly on the singers, and he has a gratifyingly strong cast. Christopher Maltman makes a solid, confident Don, while José Fardilha’s Leporello is gutsy and careworn rather than particularly comic. Laura Aikin’s glorious Donna Anna is noble and vulnerable, wronged yet attempting to understand why, and Lucy Crowe as Donna Elvira has a passionate voice of spun silver, even if it also has a pronounced narrow vibrato.
There’s passion and fire in the pit, too, from Fischer’s Budapest Festival Orchestra players, even if his unorthodox seating layout (with himself bang in the middle, strings and woodwind scattered around and behind him) makes for sounds coming from some surprising places. It’s a provocative production in what it pares down, not in what it adds or illuminates. This Don is something of a lean, austere affair.