Coliseum
Fiordiligi – Kate Valentine
Dorabella – Christine Rice
Guglielmo – Marcus Farnsworth
Ferrando – Randall Bills
Despina – Mary Bevan
Don Alfonso – Roderick Williams
Phelim McDermott (director)
Tom Pye (set designs)
Laura Hopkins (costumes)
Paule Constable (lighting)
I hoped I should never live
to see a worse staging of Così fan tutte
than Jonathan
Miller’s; indeed, I should not have thought it possible. It may resemble
the proverbial variety of judgement concerning angels on a pinhead – though I
have never quite understood the objection to scholasticism as such – but Phelim
McDermott’s mindless farrago may well have edged to victory, or to whatever we shall
elect to call it. Having deliberately waited a couple of days, to give my
initial anger time to cool, I still find McDermott’s ‘entertainment’, for want
of a better word, one of the most offensive vulgarisations Mozart can ever have
received, even if we include nineteenth- and twentieth-century maulings of the
text.
Miller at least spoke about
the artificiality of the work being crucial to its understanding, though it was
difficult to see how that informed a staging that was merely tacky. McDermott
seems to have no ideas whatsoever, whether appropriate or otherwise. The
designs are doubtless what had been requested; the problem is the lack of any
justification for them or for what unfolded in front of them. This most
exquisitely painful of works, in which that artificiality is the only way we
can deal with realities that are otherwise simply too agonising to bear,
becomes a silly story – well, barely even that – set, for no apparent reason,
in a 1950s (?) American seaside resort. Now where Così is set really does not matter; it is in no sense ‘about’
eighteenth-century Naples, though an eighteenth-century understanding of
musical form and parody remains absolutely crucial. (How on earth can one
perform, stage, or appreciate ‘Come scoglio’ without some inkling of the opera seria it parodies? It is akin to
the iconography of saints; some things one simply has to know, in order to
understanding the painting in question.) Abstraction tends to work better, as in
the case of the Magritte-like Salzburg production of Karl-Ernst
and Ursel Herrmann, and/or an exploration of the work’s dark eroticism, as
in Salzburg’s unforgettable predecessor, from Hans Neuenfels. At any rate, there
is no danger of representation, let alone probing, of musical and/or verbal
parody, of eroticism, or of anything whatsoever. Instead, we have a series of
scenes whose sole purpose seemed to be to bring on an irrelevant troupe of
circus-like artists, the ‘Skills Ensemble’. A moronic audience laughed at
everything it did: people drawing words out of a box and holding them up resulted
in helpless belly-aching.
Still worse, though, was the applause
endured not only between numbers, but within them. I am not sure that I have
heard greater violence done to Mozart than by those ‘clapping terrorists’. As
for having Despina’s appearance as notary transformed into the appearance of a
Texan (the accent…!) entertainer, to which some of the audience elected to clap
along, I can safely say I have never experienced anything like it, and
earnestly pray that I shall never do so again. In the context, the ‘traditional’
cuts I usually deplore might usefully have been expanded, perhaps to the extent
that Mozart’s music were preserved entirely for another occasion. Jeremy Sams’s
self-regarding ‘translation’ did not help. Veering wildly between something
akin to translation and free composition, it had no settled voice of its own.
For some reason, any forced rhyme – for instance, ‘rabbit’ with ‘grab it’ –
elicited yet more helpless laughter from the audience. ‘Fifty bucks’ cued yet
more hilarity; is it not utterly hilarious that someone should mention American
currency? Perhaps the nadir, though, came with a bizarre interpolation of
gratuitous racism, one of the men – I cannot remember which – saying that he
would rather marry a ‘gypsy on a dung-hill’ than either of the ladies. It must,
I think, have been at the exchange ‘Vorrei sposar piuttosto la barca di
Caronte/La grotta di Vulcano’. Quite why that would suggest such a slur upon a
vulnerable people is quite beyond me; needless to say, the audience exploded.
There was not a great deal to
cheer about in the performances either, though, with one exception, they marked
a significant improvement upon the staging. That exception was Randall Bills’s
Ferrando, quite the worst I have heard: a mixture of strenuous over-emoting on
top with persistent weakness of tone and flatness lower in the range. I have
not had much patience with the talk in some quarters that ENO should be casting
more English artists; it is not, after all, an extension of UKIP. In this case, however, it is difficult to understand
why one would go to the trouble of importing an American tenor who was so
clearly not up to the job. Marcus Farnsworth, however, showed a good degree of
swagger as Guglielmo. Kate Valentine and Christine Rice had their moments as Fiordiligi
and Dorabella. There was palpable sincerity to much of what they sang, though
neither quite had the measure of Mozart’s coloratura, and blend sometimes
proved elusive. Mary Bevan’s Despina was strongly projected, if some way from a
paragon of style. Even Roderick Williams, a singer whom I have always greatly
admired, seemed somewhat out of sorts, his first scene in particular weakly
sung, almost to the point of inaudibility. No one, however, should have been
asked to indulge in the embarrassing finger-clicking that accompanied (I think)
‘È la fede delle femmine’. Maybe, with the exception of the tenor, matters
would have improved dramatically with a better staging; maybe some of the cast
were just having an off-night. If so, one could hardly blame them.
Ryan Wigglesworth’s
conducting proved disappointing too. The Overture was not only taken far too
fast; it was brutal. As those of us who are regulars at the Coliseum know very
well, the ENO Orchestra is a fine ensemble. Here it sounded dull and
uninvolving, picking up a little in the second act. Of grace, agony, wonder,
any of the human and divine qualities Mozart demands, and through which his
drama develops, we heard little of all. It was not really a matter of tempi, although,
more often than not, they were on the fast side. More fundamentally, there was
little sense – and of course the staging did not help – of what lay in,
between, beneath the notes. Wigglesworth is an excellent musician; Mozart,
however, is very clearly not his thing. If only it had been possible to lie
back, to think of Sir Colin Davis…
