Eugene Onegin, opera review: After the interval, the show suddenly took off

It’s usual to play the lead character in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin as a supercilious snob whose patronising attitude to his inexperienced young neighbour Tatyana leads to the misery of a lost opportunity for both of them. Roderick Williams, in Michael Boyd’s new production, plays him more sympathetically, kneeling by Tatyana to explain to her, kindly, why a relationship would be a mistake.

Despite this novel but convincing approach, and despite Williams’s warm-toned, wonderfully sentient account of the role and Natalya Romaniw’s assured but impassioned Tatyana — this was a girl hungry for experience — there was little about the production’s first half to set the pulse racing. Then, after the interval, the show suddenly took off.

First, the ghost of Onegin’s friend Lensky, just shot in the duel, began to haunt him, while the horse and carriage and boat of his tedious travels were brilliantly mimed by dancers. Then the fatuity of the lackeys and coquettes attending the ball was visualised, during Gremin’s aria, by a slowly gyrating group of fan-waving courtiers. All as described in the text and inspirational as theatre. Finally the mirrored walls of Tom Piper’s set were pushed out by Onegin in a desperate bid to persuade Tatyana that he could offer a whole new world of experience.

Douglas Boyd’s urgent, well-shaped conducting perfectly complemented the unfolding drama.

Until July 7, Garsington Opera (01865 361636, garsingtonopera.org); free screenings operaforall.org

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