Eugene Onegin, Royal Opera House , review

Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin is a beautifully simple thing. First performed by students, it presents no testing technical challenges. The libretto smoothly reduces the complex ironies of Pushkin’s original verse novel to the dimensions of romantic pulp fiction, charging it with the poignant cliché that we may live to regret our past mistakes. It’s comfort opera that warms cold hearts, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

So I can never understand why directors feel impelled to make such a meal of it. Kasper Holten is the latest in this line: his new production is puppyishly over-excited, rubbing the audience’s noses in the idea of remorseful retrospection and stuffed with extraneous ideas which contribute nothing to the overall emotional impact.

The orchestral prelude is played out in dumb show as the mature Onegin and Tatyana look back to their foolish youthful selves – a point rather poetically made, had it stopped there. But as the story unfolds, Holten proceeds to fuss everything up by using young dancer doubles to mirror the pair’s actions, while failing to suggest matters of basic importance such as the modest social estate of Tatyana’s family and her consequent vulnerability to smart city folk.

Much else in the production seems merely perverse: dressing both the serfs and the society nobs in uniforms of penitential black bombazine, for example, or transforming Onegin from a bored sardonic sophisticate into a bumptious playful flirt.

Here, in sum, is one of those stagings where the director is writing his own script, rather than focusing on the implications of the notes and words in front of him. Designed by Mia Stensgaard, Katrina Lindsay and Wolfgang Göbbel, it generates some attractive tableaux (Holten being Danish, the feel is more Scandinavian than Russian) and it is not without moments of warmth or humanity. But it is Holten’s Eugene Onegin, not Pushkin’s or Tchaikovsky’s.

Robin Ticciati’s conducting proved alert, responsive and engaged but never quite settled or whole-hearted: I wonder if Tchaikovsky is his bag. As Tatyana and Onegin, Krassimira Stoyanova and Simon Keenlyside sang with style, grandeur, ardour and every desirable quality except the freshness of youth. Meanwhile Pavol Breslik’s blonde bombshell of a Lensky stole the show: after delivering his wistful aria elegantly and falling victim to Onegin’s bullet, he played Sleeping Tigers, lying inert on the stage as a bloodstained corpse throughout the final act and duly winning the audience’s loudest applause.

Until 20 Feburary Box Office 020 7 304 4000 www.roh.org.uk