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Andrew Shore’s Friar Melitone in The Force of Destiny.
‘Bumblingly comic and profoundly sinister’ … Andrew Shore’s Friar Melitone in The Force of Destiny. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian
‘Bumblingly comic and profoundly sinister’ … Andrew Shore’s Friar Melitone in The Force of Destiny. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

The Force of Destiny review – no one is spared in Bieito’s bleak vision of Verdi

This article is more than 8 years old

Coliseum, London
Verdi’s revenge tale is transplanted to the Spanish civil war for an unflinchingly brutal and finely sung and played performance


English National Opera’s third new show of the season, and the second that Mark Wigglesworth conducts as its music director, brings what is arguably Verdi’s most unsparing tragedy back to the Coliseum after more than two decades.

Gwyn Hughes Jones as Don Alvaro in The Force of Destiny. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Calixto Bieito’s production transplants The Force of Destiny to the brutality of the Spanish civil war. Newsreel images from that conflict are projected on to Rebecca Ringst’s stark, strikingly monochrome sets and, as the flags brandished during the second act make clear, the army in which Alvaro (Gwyn Hughes Jones) and Carlo (Anthony Michaels-Moore) finally come face to face is that of the nationalists. There are no republicans to be seen, and Bieito’s take does not seem to be specifically a political one; instead he suggests that the hatred and thirst for revenge that sets brother against sister at the centre of the drama is a mirror image of the enmity that drives a nation to tear itself apart in a civil war, a process that all the hypocrisy and sanctimoniousness of the church can do nothing to prevent.

As always with Bieito there are ideas that are hard to decipher – the orgy of book tearing during the inn scene of the second act; the image of a girl mindlessly doodling on a blackboard projected on to the front cloth during the second interval. But the majority of the graphic images that he puts on stage vividly evoke the cruelty at the opera’s core. None more so than when in the third act, Preziosilla, a gypsy fortune-teller in Verdi’s original scheme and sung with just the right kind of brittle brilliance by Rinat Shaham, incites the soldiers to brutalise a group of refugees and then ritually executes some of them during the famous Rataplan chorus. Even the shafts of humour that Verdi sometimes allows to shine through are turned to comedy of the blackest, most savagely ironic kind.

‘An outstanding Leonora’ … Tamara Wilson in The Force of Destiny. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

Wigglesworth’s highly energised approach suits the unflinching directness of the staging – orchestrally and chorally the performance is high-class. He conducts what is essentially Verdi’s 1869 revision of the score, though he reinstates the original, shorter version of the prelude, and the original order of a couple of arias in the third act. The dramatic involvement of all the cast suggest that they too have bought into Bieito’s approach – Tamara Wilson is an outstanding Leonora, touchingly vulnerable in the early scenes, but reserving her finest singing for the last act, and Hughes Jones also seems to gain in impressive authority as the opera goes on. Michaels-Moore charts Carlo’s descent into vengeful madness with forensic care, while Andrew Shore manages to make the friar Melitone both bumblingly comic and profoundly sinister at the same time; no one is spared in Bieito’s bleak vision.

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