Opera as it should be
This, at last, is what the English National Opera is for
If anyone wants to see what ENO is for, and why London really does want two opera houses (even if the citizens can’t really be bothered), the contrast between this staging of Figaro and the one that periodically crops up at Covent Garden half a mile away says pretty much everything that needs to be said. At the Royal Opera it’s all wigs and cornices, fancy palace sets, opulent scenic detail and a typically acute naturalistic staging by David McVicar — a kind of intelligent version of old-time opera.
ENO gives us a big white box on stage (very good for voice projection, of course), four doors, no other scenery, about three props, the edgy vocab of physical theatre and a cast buzzing with emotional turmoil and nervous energy. Joe Hill-Gibbins’s staging, on its first appearance in March 2020, was the best and fizziest show ENO had put on for years, a sign that the company was staggering dazedly back to its feet after the happy departure of yet another useless Artistic Director. But after just one performance, Covid closed the theatres and everything else, then ENO received a series of capricious death threats from the so-called government and Arts Council; the change of regime was supposed to reverse all that idiocy, but naturally hasn’t, and ENO now seems irreversibly doomed to a fatuous and underfunded split between London and Manchester operations, to the benefit of nobody.
Well, boohoo and all that, and for as long as I can remember the company has seemed to be committing slow suicide in public, but when you catch a glimpse of what it’s actually for, and remember what a great show in the unmatchably fab Coliseum is like, it hurts to think it’s probably coming to an end. As it is, the entire 24/25 season ends later this month, lasted less than five months, and everything looks a bit desperate.
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Back to Figaro: and thank God they revived it. Hill-Gibbins is a legit-theater director who has dabbled in opera, took on this marvellous piece without being hamstrung by the weight of expectation it carries — and came up with a triumph. This is terribly rare: very few theatre directors care about music, and they find the way it dictates the pace of operatic drama baffling. But this director has ears and a heart and understands that the music is the drama.
And that drama is the transformation of a small group of people, their emotions and relationships, in the course of a busy day of upstairs-downstairs business at the Almaviva house. Sure, Mozart had some pretty elevated aims, and Figaro is certainly a monument to a seismic change in sensibility, but you hardly need to know that to be enchanted by it. What we actually see and hear is a happy, sad, wise snapshot of dawning emotional awareness accomplished through a musical score of profound spiritual joyousness that manages to be incredibly efficient while creating the most fully recognisable and rounded human portraits ever seen on stage. Narrowing this down to the barest essentials of these characters reacting to each other, with all the overcomplicated fooflah of the source play’s endless letters and intrigues more signalled than enacted turns out to be a very good way of doing it.
One of Hill-Gibbins’s great wheezes is those doors I mentioned: partly as a gesture to the Ray Cooney-like bustle and panic of the constant commedia-style hide-and-seek that the original author Beaumarchais put his dram pers through, but mostly as a way into their tormented emotional lives. For the Count (Cody Quattlebaum), a philanderer tormented by unfounded (and rather Freudian) suspicions of his wife’s infidelity, behind every door lurks evidence of her making whoopee with the entire household; for priapic young Cherubino it’s every unavailable female as fantasy hottie; while the neglected Countess sees everyone except herself (including the servants) bathed in a glow of connubial contentment.
The result is a rather beautiful and very Mozartian understanding of people as the helpless victims of their feelings, uncontrollable urges and insecurities. Sure, we are responsible for our actions, but this opera acts as a high-tab defence brief pleading our frailty and longing for love and connection in mitigation of the dreadful ways we carry on. Even the Count, who naturally gets the roughest of rides in these unforgiving times, is allowed a small degree of sympathy.
Nor does it skimp on pain and cruelty. When Susanna sings Mozart’s most gorgeous love-song in the night-time Act 4 garden, Figaro, her husband of half-an-hour (in a strong, layered and bumptious performance by David Ireland), lies in wrecked despair, believing (as Susanna intends he should) that it is addressed to the Count. It’s a complicated moment: Susanna (played and sung with boisterous energy and real sensitivity by Mary Bevan) is Mozart’s goddess, the motor of all the transformations, and finds herself doling out this torture to a beloved who really deserves little more than a slap. On the empty darkened stage, the layers of anguish, regret and emotional horror are created with the least demonstrative, most effective tiny gestures by the pair, a fulcrum of all that Mozart wants to make us think and feel.
The show is, also, actually funny — starting with Jeremy Sams’s blithe and effortless translation, but again really a matter of music: the orchestra’s irrepressible spirits unleashed to gambol and play by Latvian conductor Ainārs Rubiķis, the bounciest interpretation that highlights the score’s constant pull towards dance: and when Cherubino sings “Voi che sapete”, Susanna and the Countess are helplessly seduced by it into a slow boogie, a moment of pure Magic Flute-like charm.
The director shows strong nerves, veering back and forth from farce to near tragedy, and walking the tightrope with great skill. With just a few deepening colours in the lighting, this daring experiment, thanks to the cast’s total engagement, never feels like some cheapskate poor-theatre job. They play the edgy physical comedy (Complicité-ish in its intricacy) like a seasoned touring troupe, slick and assured in timing and movement, not traditionally the strong point of opera singers, and with Mozart’s big comic money-shots Cherubino getting his marching orders, Susanna emerging from that closet, the revelation of Figaro’s parentage – perfectly brought off as a mix of pathos and laughs. It has to be, and is, an ensemble achievement: Nardus Williams’s gorgeously sung, wistful but game Countess, Hanna Hipp the sassy and delightful Cherubino, Ava Dodd as young Barbarina bringing a frisson of lost innocence to her dusky F minor melancholy of losing a pin (and what else?) in the twilight, Rebecca Evans and Neal Davies creating something deeper than the usual caricatures as Marcellina and Bartolo, and the chorus contributing hugely to the effervescence and emotional depth of the piece.
The focus gets a bit blurry on the open stage of the last act, that almost unstageable farce of mistaken identity in the dark, a thing of mixed fun and growing apprehension which you want to build to a shattering burst of metaphorical light and blessing as the Countess emerges from the darkness to judge and forgive her sinful husband. That’s a moment that can hardly fail, though, and the sheer relief of the celebrations that follow are an infectious end to a show that gives Mozart’s uncannily accurate depiction of the human condition (and how it might be fixed) its most sheerly enjoyable, original and stylish outing for ages.
The Marriage of Figaro is at the Coliseum until Feb 22
