UK Edition
Review
Lucia di Lammermoor, Royal Opera House, verdict: 'too leaden even for the hecklers'
Ever since the Royal Opera foolishly issued a warning last month that its new production of Donizetti’s tragedy would contain high levels of sex and violence, expectations of a juicy scandal were raised. But although there was plenty of booing (and cheering) at the final curtain, there was nothing like the furore of spontaneous outrage that threatened to bring Guillaume Tell to a halt last summer.
A lot of thought has gone into Katie Mitchell’s staging, most of it misguided. Vicki Mortimer has designed handsome settings updating the scenario to a mid-Victorian period and presenting a well-appointed stately home that could have been inspired by The Woman in White or Lady Audley’s Secret – an environment far more urbane than the one presented in Scott’s original novel, and one that negates the sense of primitive blood-feud that lies at the story’s dark heart.
Stroppy, duplicitous, and sexually aggressive, Mitchell makes Lucia a curiously modern figure, more Ruth Ellis than the fey Romantic heroine depicted in the music. Donizetti and his librettist quite carefully and plausibly chart her descent into madness – but Mitchell has chosen to ignore this, inventing a gratuitous plot line in which Lucia is desperately trying to abort Edgardo’s baby, enlisting the help of her maid Alisa and some kinky sex games in disposing of her wretched blameless husband.
Some might find this intriguing; I found it merely perverse – and heavy-handed too. As with most of Mitchell’s recent work, the audience’s imagination is allowed no leeway: everything has to be spelt out literally. The spectre that haunts Lucia’s dreams wanders ominously through every scene; the love duet in the second scene becomes graphically (and ludicrously) sexual; and our noses are rubbed in the grisly details of Lucia’s miscarriage.
Mitchell also wants to extend the action beyond its obvious focus, showing us what characters are doing when they aren’t singing. But the accretion of banal detail – much of it irrelevant – becomes deadening, and the net effect of the production is clodhopping. David Alden’s recent production at English National Opera was far more richly intelligent and subtly suggestive.
Lucia is a role eternally associated at Covent Garden with Joan Sutherland: the German soprano Diana Damrau is not in the same class. To be fair, she has an awful lot of acting to do throughout, and she executed Mitchell’s dottier ideas with admirable commitment. But in the first act, her coloratura was smudged, her top notes shrill and her trill non-existent. Her style is mannered and fussy: too much resort is made to a sort of crooning at the expense of firm phrasing. Although she produced some gorgeous sounds in the first section of the mad scene, she failed to bring it to a spectacular conclusion.
Far more consistently satisfying was the American tenor Charles Castronovo – a dashingly handsome Edgardo who sung with all the steady line and full tone that Damrau seemed to lack. That splendid beast of a French baritone Ludovic Tézier was slightly miscast as Enrico (whose incestuous feelings for Lucia were surprisingly not explored here), but Kwangchul Youn was a properly baleful Raimondo and Taylor Stayton made his mark as the hapless Arturo.
Daniel Oren conducts a pedestrian account of the score, marred by some slack tempi and lapses in ensemble. Long pauses between some of the scenes, the inclusion of the usually omitted Wolf’s Crag episode and a protracted interval combine to make this a rather leaden evening that dispirited even those who came to heckle.
Until 19 May. Box office: 020 7304 4000, roh.org.uk