, Sunday 3 June 2001

Desperate Don...

Calixto Bieito, who was responsible for the new production of Don Giovanni, earned the strongest derision. In response, and clearly used to such displays of feeling, he blew kisses to the audience, attracting cheers nearly loud enough to drown the boos.

This sordid, trousers-down romp, in which all human detritus is on offer, presumably sets out to shock.

Leporello, greasy-haired in his nylon shell suit, snorted coke with all the finesse of a child blowing flour through a peashooter. Donna Elvira (Claire Weston) binged on chocolate with a greed that matched Don Giovanni's appetite for women. All she lacked was a few fried Mars bars for a full, Presley-style blow out. The usually shy Zerlina, here a brazen hussy who rips her wedding dress to make way for the Don's advances, hides in a cardboard box, then invites her boyfriend, Masetto, to beat her as if she's after a spot of S&M rather than seeking penitence. Don Giovanni turns up to the masked ball in a wheelchair.

Donna Anna and Don Ottavio have it off (to use the terminology of the production) mid-aria - quite a feat and somewhat redundant, since the music is far more eloquent than the shadow bonking of a large soprano squeezed into a far-too-tight miniskirt and a small tenor dressed up in half a Superman suit, could ever be. Eventually the contents of a rubbish bin are upturned and scattered across the stage: the Chapman brothers meet Mr Pastry.

It was all so boring. To look at your watch in this work, to feel no chill in the soul but merely tedium, never to smile at the acid-sharp musical and verbal wit, is truly dispiriting. By comparison, Graham Vick's reviled dung-heap staging for Glyndebourne last year was a model of restraint and veracity. The difference was that Vick made crystal clear the heights from which the hero had fallen. Here you start at rock bottom and go nowhere.

Had the singing and playing been better, all would have been forgiven. From the chaotic, unfocused account of the overture, it was clear that the conductor (the unaccountably unbooed Joseph Swensen) had already lost the plot. It was as if the backbone of the music had been removed, leaving a shapeless, unsupported, un-Mozartian muddle.

At times the orchestra wisely took its own lead and the singers tried to follow. A glorious clarinet solo in the second act was a forceful reminder that, as with the singers, it wasn't the orchestra's fault. Matters did improve slightly in the second half, when there are more arias and less business. Paul Nilon worked miracles to raise the mood with his Don Ottavio. Despite his best endeavours, Garry Magee in the title role couldn't rescue the situation.

Alfons Flores and Mercè Paloma had designed a perfect set and costumes for West Side Story but the Sharks and the Jets never appeared nor, alas for da Ponte, any form of social critique: everyone was no one. Without any form of baffle, the design did little to help the young singers and their voices were lost, so to speak, in the open flies.

Don Giovanni, Eno/Coliseum, London
Full of sound and fury signifying nothing

, 4 June 2001

Sex for Anna means the back of a car. For Ottavio, it's as good as copulating with a blow-up doll. For Zerlina it's being orally pleasured up her wedding skirt. Giovanni's biggest turn-on is to masturbate in front of toy belly-dancers, before wiping his hand on someone else's hair. As for violence, well, you either smash your opponent's car (the Commendatore confronting Giovanni), smash his face (Giovanni confronting Masetto) or tie him up with a dustbin over his head (Masetto confronting Leporello).

Welcome to Reality Opera. Like Reality TV, it bears no relation to the reality you or I or 99 per cent of the rest of the population know, but it's hot and relentlessly "entertaining", it's full of nerds, and it blithely claims to reflect the true side of human nature. To rub in the point, English National Opera's new Don Giovanni has a cameraman on stage to capture the juicy bits on film.

The producer, Calixto Bieito, has a reputation for homing in on the crotch-grabbing, coke-snorting school of stage behaviour, and his Don Giovanni is wonderfully true to form. Giovanni, we learn from the programme essay, "is to be found inside us all ... (heis) what we want, what we desire, and what we dread". This is a Don Giovanni "emphatically for today", inspired by Scorsese, Kubrick, Almodovar.

But let's get one thing clear: this Don Giovanni is not inspired by Mozart - or by Tirso de Molina, the Spanish monk on whose play the opera is based. Bieito's show - like most of his other work - is a stage adaptation of the seamier side of urban culture in his native Catalonia, filtered through his peculiarly Latin imagination. Everyone is a tart or a thug, often at the same time. Elvira guzzles sweets and brandishes a gun. Anna fakes an orgasm at the top of "Non mi dir" and draws blood from her fiance's hand. Zerlina is "a little bitch". The music is incidental. Much of the time, you don't even realise it's there.

Bieito's theory is that Giovanni-as-life-force calls out the passions of everyone he meets - but ultimately he needs to be destroyed if life is to be more "liveable", albeit boring and deceitful. Not a bad theory. The trouble is translating it into a convincing stage show, a task Bieito is simply not up to.

His staging depends on the shock factor - but like any shock, it quickly wears off. There's too much going on, the show dissolves into tedium - and Bieito is not clever enough to vary the pace or make it funny. As in so many "contemporary" takes on classical operas, the characters are all equally bad: we're invited to sneer at how disgusting human life has become, while suspecting that the director is sneering at us. Most fatally, the Giovanni we behold on the stage of the London Coliseum has nothing especially attractive or exciting about him. He's a bum in a sweatshirt, no more alluring than the obsessively overweight Elvira, the lizard-like Ottavio or the leopard-skin Anna. Why does everyone get so worked up about such an insignificant bloke? Bieito's staging has no answer.

Buried in this would-be sensationalist approach are one or two valid apercus. By demonstrating that sex between Giovanni and Anna is consensual, Bieito makes us party to her sense of post-coital rejection, her guilt and fear of exposure. Having packed off the bloodied Commendatore in the boot of Giovanni's car, Bieito unpacks him, half-alive, in the penultimate scene so that the others can make common cause for retribution. And it is a common cause: Giovanni is tied to a chair and everyone takes it in turn to knife him - a metaphor for society condemning what it hates most in itself.

Bieito's achievement is to persuade his cast to act out their parts with conviction and scorching energy. It's not quite enough to persuade us of Garry Magee's status as a Don Juan. Modest in build and voice, Magee is not what you would call charismatic - least of all in "La` ci darem", the key to any Giovanni's seductiveness. Nathan Berg, who sings Leporello, would have been a better bet: this tall, majestic bass is a brilliant actor and a palpable presence on stage. Claire Rutter beats her way through the visual distractions to convince us of Anna's radiant coloratura. Claire Weston, one of ENO's junior company principals, sings a punchy Elvira that fully justifies her elevation to the senior ranks. Paul Nilon's well-established Ottavio is inexplicably denied his first aria. Phillip Ens makes a commanding Commendatore, Linda Richardson and Leslie John Flanagan a well-matched pair of betrothed.

I liked the bare simplicity of Alfons Flores's spotlit set and the Spanish colours of Merce` Paloma's costumes - but not Joseph Swensen's attempt to match in music the energy and brutality of the stage proceedings: the ENO orchestra ought to have a disclaimer in the programme. The show is probably unrevivable. It's just as well the costs are shared by Hanover and Barcelona.

© The Financial Times Limited

The new Don Giovanni at the Coliseum brought English National Opera one of its rowdiest first-night receptions in a long while (May 31). The work of the Spanish team of director Calixto Bieito, and designers Alfons Flores (sets) and Mercè Paloma (costumes), who gave Welsh National Opera a coarse contemporary version of Così Fan Tutte last season, it continued along the same lines but went a lot further.

This too was modern dress, the photographs in the program identifying the setting as the bar culture of Barcelona (the show is a co-production with the Liceu). Don Giovanni (Garry Magee) and Donna Anna (Claire Rutter) began the evening coupling in the back of a car, while Leporello sat on the hood and bemoaned his lot. The Commendatore (Phillip Ens actually looked about the same age as his daughter) turned up out of nowhere to be stabbed, but that was not the death of him. In the final scene he emerged bloody but unbowed from the car's trunk, to be dispatched at last by the serial seducer (something of a gloss on the text). The latter survived until the final ensemble, when the remaining members of the cast tied him to a chair, gagged him and, one by one, stabbed him with a kitchen knife.

The opera centers on the career of a man obsessed with orgasm, but the overt sexual activities in this production were by no means confined to the protagonist. Don Ottavio (Paul Nilon) partially undressed and then had (presumably simulated) sex with Donna Anna during "Non mi dir." It was scarcely surprising in the circumstances that Rutter's performance of the aria was lackluster. Donna Elvira (Claire Weston) orally serviced Leporello at the point when she mistook him for her former lover. Naturally, sex and violence are vital components of any Don Giovanni, but on this occasion, there was little room left for anything else.

Dispiriting above all was the poor quality of singing from this cast, several of whom (notably Magee and Nilon) have shown in the past how well they can deliver this music in happier circumstances. A common tendency was to shout lines, as in a play, instead of singing phrases made up of notes. Mozart seemed to have become a nuisance. But then, so had Da Ponte, with crucial elements of plot, characterization and location ignored. If Don Giovanni wears no disguise when he attempts to rape Donna Anna, how could she fail to recognize him? If Giovanni is just another lowlife, what is subversive about his class-crossing sexual escapades? If the Act I finale takes place not on his estate but in a public bar, why would the uninvited guests feel so uneasy about turning up?

There were few survivors of this dreadful evening. Weston's incipient wobble has become a problem. Nathan Berg sang Leporello and, like the rest of the cast, gave a committed visual performance but one devoid of any sense of vocal style. Linda Richardson's silvery-toned Zerlina partially made it through the mess, but Leslie John Flanagan's Masetto was purely brutish. In the pit, Joseph Swensen conducted a fast and superficial account of the so-called Prague version of the score. Perhaps the most depressing aspect of the evening was the almost embarrassing eagerness to shock. Most of us were just plain bored.

June 2001

Some of the Vietnam draft-dodging generation objected to Joseph Losey's 1979 movie version of Don Giovanni because it introduced ideas about class in a realistic way, with very grubby peasants. Thatcher's children seem to be objecting to Calixto Bieito's new production at the ENO because it emphasises abuse and displays it as practiced by today's hedonists. Of course there's nothing more reactionary than an old radical, but it's pushing it to look to Mozart and Da Ponte's Don Giovanni for uplifting spiritual beauty. They turn an already familiar opera buffa that presents the name character's sexual escapades as entertainment, with a cod moral ending, into an exercise in passion and cruelty which emerges as more life affirming than the conventional morality (represented by the Commendatore and Don Ottavio) that opposes it. Casanova and the Marquis de Sade are not far away. But a core subset of the audience for opera in most cities expects vocal beauty and reassurance, and a few of them like to whinge, or boo, if they don't get it. There were boos at both performances so far of this production at the ENO, which should be flattered that its customers now behave as if they were at the Met or La Scala.

The boos were almost inevitable, given the expectations aroused by Bieito's track record in the UK. He directed a pretty good La vide e sueño (about what happens when the animal part of a human gets to let rip) for the Edinburgh Festival, a Così for Welsh National Opera that went back to its sex-comedy roots and then failed to deliver the comedy (in a Barcelona café), and a production for Edinburgh last year that had the actors refusing to perform. Like his Così, Don Giovanni turns out to be visually dreary, with a black set representing a street and then a bar, often disturbing, especially for the performers, and thoroughly thought through and coherent in its own terms. In contrast to Bieito's Così, which looked radical and a bit stylish even if it didn't work, there are comparatively few ideas that haven't been seen before. Peter Sellars did the urban degradation, with underclass and criminal characters rather than clubbers, and found physical disturbance through sex and drugs reflected in the music. And Tony Britten's Music Theatre London did the naff hedonism and laddishness (Don Giovanni is probably a footballer and Leporello is his adoring best mate), though with rather more humour. Bieito's main contribution is to see something Spanish in an opera set in Seville, though it turns out to be Brits in Ibiza.

So the only real question is, how well does it work? It is certainly not a particularly enjoyable or entertaining evening in the opera house (give or take a handful of vocal moments), and for many that means it doesn't work at all. But even on its own terms, the performance doesn't seem to deliver. Perversely, its dominant mood is tedium rather than danger. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's tedious to watch or listen to. But what comes over is world-weariness and desperation, to some extent in the music as well as in the singers' performances. At the same time, the concept is simply too cerebral, not embodied in the action. Opera singers are in the business of delivering extreme emotion, but Bieito seems to ask them to deliver it in a total performance that is too far from singing so that the music belongs only if you make a conscious effort to link it to the action.

The singers, nevertheless, generally give committed performances and it is possible to imagine that it all might come together (as it really wasn't with Così). Claire Weston as Donna Elvira got by far the worst of the production. In a world without real passion or beauty, Elvira, the woman so desirable that Don Giovanni married her to get her, turns into a neurotic basket case, in scruffy denim and fossicking in her bag for a gun like Sara Jane Moore in Assassins. Weston's acting consisted of tics like twisting her hair and tantrums that she didn't come near integrating with the music, though it was a tall. Her singing sounded pressured, not really surprisingly, and her voice is probably too big for Elvira in any case. She did well not to struggle, and it was probably a good thing that the production used the Prague edition so that she didn't have to deal with Mì tradi. Claire Rutter as Donna Anna (in a fat-slag mini skirt) was too similar physically and in her basic voice, but far more together dramatically and vocally. A bit of desperation is fine for Anna, of course. Linda Richardson as a perky Zerlina, up for it in a wedding dress, had a characterization that nearly worked. Leslie John Flanagan was a bland Masetto, losing any character he might have with his peasant trappings.

As Don Giovanni, Gary Magee didn't quite deliver on his demonic promise, coming over as more of a real, boring and obnoxious, lad than the charismatic anti-hero. His singing was solid rather than sexy. Nathan Berg's Leporello was a considerably more substantial presence, even in his underwear and a hairy-chest-and-corset plastic apron. Only a mid-Atlantic accent rang a gentle false note. Phillip Ens was quite terrific as the Commendatore, not quite middle aged yet and obviously a thug, with a truly sinister resonance in his voice. When Don Giovanni kills him, they bundle him into the boot of his car, from which he drags himself (like John Travolta) when he arrives for dinner, in the only moment of real theatricality in the production. Paul Nilon as Don Ottavio wore the top half of a Superman outfit under his dullish suit for most of the opera, and sang superbly in spite of everything. Il miò tesoro was the high point of the evening. It worked quite well within the production, where Ottavio's wussy character doesn't need too much distorting. But it made you long for some more real singing unimpeded by misery.

London Coliseum
05/31/01 - and 2, 7, 9, 13, 16, 20, 23, 26, 29 June, 2, 6 July
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Don Giovanni
Nathan Berg (Leporello), Claire Rutter (Donna Anna), Garry Magee (Don Giovanni), Phillip Ens (Commendatore), Paul Nilon (Don Ottavio), Claire Weston (Donna Elvira), Linda Richardson (Zerlina), Leslie John Flanagan (Masetto)
Joseph Swenson (conductor), Calixto Bieito (director)
ENO Chorus and Orchestra

Musicweb.com,S&H Concert review, June 2001

ENO's first new Don Giovanni since 1995 reverses the didacticism that good triumphs over evil - both literally and metaphysically: there is more cruelty in this intensely comic production than one would normally expect to see in a lifetime of comic opera-going. Yet, Mozart would probably have warmed to this production by the Barcelonan director Calixto Bieito as it does adopt the Mozartian critique of society touched on throughout the libretto -merely transporting it from the eighteenth century to the nineteen nineties. Its controversy does not lie in this 'updating' but in how Bieito eschews interaction between the characters and concentrates instead on a subliminal interaction between place and environment and, most of all, political satire. This production lays the blame for boorishness and infidelity clearly at the door of society. No character in this production (least of all Don Giovanni) emerges with any degree of sympathy - and even characters such as Donna Elvira have any humanity removed from them by Bieitos' insistence that they too are invariably looking up from the gutter. This is a Don in which all the participants are high on drugs and sex and corrupted by it. Look at this production as a two-week holiday on a tacky Spanish resort.

The production opens with Leporello (an excellent Nathan Berg, greasy haired and track-suited) emerging from a car driven on stage - while Don Giovanni and Donna Anna remain inside rocking the car from side to side with their energetic 'lovemaking'. Immediately the location is set, the first act's obsession with possessiveness and greed laid prostrate before us by a cast lusting in the rancour of an Ibizian piss-up. Bags play a big part in all this - amusingly so. Leporello's Adidas bag (which he is not without once throughout the entire first act) acts as a sort of mini-bar crammed full of lager cans - which both he and Don Giovanni guzzle laddishly throughout the drama. Donna Anna's bag is more discerning in design (Essex girl leather) but it is left to Donna Elvira (a memorably comic performance by Claire Weston), with her three shopping bags (albeit designer ones), to emphasise the tragedy of these characters' predicaments. Like a tired bag lady she carries these around as if they are the only memories from a once happy life and which now literally are the only possessions of her life. Has she been reduced to this by Don Giovanni's cruelty? As he humiliates her further by kicking them around stage like a football the answer becomes evident as she is stripped of any dignity. As Act II opens she is seen slumped across a table, drunk, as her humiliation comes full circle. Elvira is now a drinking, chocolate devouring figure seeking solace in anything other than the people around her. The brutality of the Commendatore's knifing (Tarantinoesque in its violence), Ottavio's semi-pornographic seduction of Donna Anna, Leporello's Act II humiliation (with sexual overtones of sadomasochism) and the voyeuristic filming of the wedding and party all seek to exploit the characters' inability to do anything about the human predicament. It certainly leaves a nasty aftertaste.

Indeed, the major problem with this production is the sheer weight of Bieito's vision which compels one to be less interested in the music than in the on-stage action. In being almost too clever for his own good Bieito relegates Mozart's score to a firm second place - almost as if this were in fact theatre rather than opera. As if to emphasise this the ensembles were often scrambled - diction drunkenly slurred. The Ball scene which concludes Act I here becomes a raucous party the effect being to totally undermine the balletic scoring. Don Ottavio's and Donna Anna's minuet is banished (and not just because she is inexplicably wheelchair bound) and the three stage orchestra's suggested in the libretto are no where to be seen. The synchronisation and rhythm which this scene usually suggests is removed - indeed, this party was a free-for-all that bordered on the orgiastic. Even where Mozart intended to establish an equanimity of balance and order Bieito feels free to establish disunity and chaos.

Film (or the suggestion of) haunts this production like the ghost of the Commendatore (who in the end is no ghost at all). The filming of the wedding and party scenes, with close ups of simulated sex, invokes the voyeurism of films such as Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, yet when the film-maker adopts a Thatcherite face mask it takes on more sinister suggestions of Big Brother watching them. It is not until later we realise exactly how perverse this camera work has been. The TV, which sits on stage at the opening of Act II, reminded me of Derek Jarman's Blue - if only because the screen remained Tory blue. When the screen actually changes from blue to the film that had been shot earlier the sense of prying and voyeurism really is brought full circle. Now we are the voyeurs. Yet, Leporello's torture, with his nipples and legs being tweaked and his binding, like a crucifixion, reminds clearly of the martyrdom of St Sebastiane. As Leporello crawls around the stage dressed like a Union Jacked armadillo one is reminded again of one of Jarman's starkest films, The Last of England. The iconography in this production is ultimately unsettling - so much is being said, often simultaneously, that a sense of suffocation settles in. Perhaps more startling is Bieito's draconian wilfulness in rewriting the drama of the libretto. The Commendatore's reappearance is not as a statue at all -Don Giovanni instead sees him on the label of a bottle - no doubt from a mescaline-induced state of druggedness. When the Commendatore reappears he does so from the boot of the car (with the apt number plate C-TORE 1 one should have anticipated it) - and still very much alive. Don Giovanni merely kills him again. Rather than being dragged to hell and sinking into the flames, as the libretto suggests, the final septet is used as a scene to murder Don Giovanni. The way in which this is done, with each character getting revenge for being the subject of Don Giovanni's cruelty, indicated that Bieito must have seen Ruggero Deodato's House on the Edge of the Park. As in that film's climax, any sense that the character's can win back their humanity is dissolved by their desire for vengeance in the most violent of terms.

Despite the formidable problems with this intellectualised staging (i.e. what is really going on?) the singers attack their roles with power and commitment. Garry Magee's Don Giovanni is well sung and his cherubic features mask a malevolent streak in his acting (which whilst not quite as convincing as Nathan Berg's is still memorable). Claire Rutter is a rather magnificent sounding Donna Anna and Phillip Ens a commanding Commendatore. Joseph Svensen conducts a fast paced performance (the opening overture was very fast indeed) although the playing (even from where I was sat in the stalls) lacked passion and drama and was toneless. This production has been greeted with almost universal hostility. It deserves little of it. Calixto Bieito's direction is clever (perhaps too clever) but it at least challenges one's preconceptions, which is something you cannot say about many opera productions today.

Further performances of Don Giovanni are on June 16, 20, 26, 29 and July 2 & 6.

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