UK Edition
Review
La Traviata, ENO, review: there was no scandal here, just conventional operatic melodrama
Any expectations fuelled by preview coverage that this production of La Traviata would provide a scandal on a par with Covent Garden’s Guillaume Tell will be bitterly disappointed.
You’d have to be a member of the Plymouth Brethren to be shocked by Daniel Kramer’s staging: no rape, no bloodshed, just two rather hysterical Cynthia Payne orgies in the first and third scenes during which saucy gentlemen strip down to fetish underwear amid a lot of squealing. In this late stage of civilisation, it counts as tame stuff – ooh! Vicomte Gaston is a pouting drag queen with nipple tassels! – and not very crisply choreographed at that.
More significantly, Kramer hasn’t fully engaged with Verdi’s emotional drama. His designers Lizzie Clachan and Esther Bialas should have been reined in: they go wild with glossy art deco for the Paris interiors, populating it with a froth of costumes that obscure the action and exhaust the eye. The period is left vague, oscillating between mid 19th and 20th century, with the result that we don’t know quite where we are in terms of moral constraints or the social position of women.
The central confrontation between Germont père and Violetta has no intensity or poignancy, and is stiffly acted. We never sense that Violetta is doomed from the start, or that Germont represents a repressive patriarchy, or that Alfredo is a nice innocent who has strayed over the tracks. It’s all just conventional operatic melodrama, despite the odd bright idea such as Violetta’s attempt to slash her wrists after she has surrendered her chance of happiness.
Only in the final scene does the staging come imaginatively alive: here we see Violetta digging her own grave surrounded by mattresses that look like tombstones, as black spectral figures float across the background. But nothing in this haunting tableau relates to what has gone before.
Miscasting of the two principals doesn’t help. Claudia Boyle is spirited, with a secure technique. She floats some lovely top notes and copes intelligently with the varied demands of Violetta’s music. But she has no vulnerability, no fragility, no hesitancy, and her light clean soprano doesn’t have sufficient colour or weight to convey the character’s turmoil. A South African tenor Lukhanyo Moyake is even more out of his histrionic depth as Alfredo: he sings with excellent diction and focus, but radiates no personality whatsoever.
The one shining star is in the pit, where the young British conductor Leo McFall kept the orchestra under firm control without sacrificing sensitivity or grace. The melancholy beauty of the opening prelude was the evening’s highlight.
This is a show that falls between two stools: it’s neither the nice safe staging that can be repeatedly revived to please ordinary once-a-year operagoers, nor the reinterpretation that impresses fancy-pants critics and wins prizes.
So where does this leave ENO, an organisation that cannot afford any more mistakes? It is clearly stuck in too many grooves, including the practice of performing everything in English translation – except the works of Philip Glass, which are nonsensically presented in Sanskrit and Akkadian.
Other fundamental problems not only remain, but intensify. It is lumbered with a vast and inefficient theatre, lacking rehearsal or storage space, that it can seldom fill beyond 70 per cent of its financial capacity. And its low rate of productivity – only 79 main house performances this season, in comparison with double that number 20 years ago – scarcely justifies a full chorus (now on a nine-month contract), symphony orchestra, backstage crew and administrative establishment, not to mention the annual subsidy of over £12 million contributed by hard-pressed taxpayers.
Appointed earlier this month, Stuart Murphy is ENO’s new Chief Executive, successor to Cressida Pollock, who lasted only three years in the job. He comes from subscription television, where his record was mixed, and he has zero experience of managing live theatre to offer. The last time ENO made a similar appointment, in the case of the BBC producer Dennis Marks, the experiment ended disastrously with his abrupt departure. I wish Murphy well, but am not optimistic that he can square a circle.
If I met him, I would say that although I believe that London merits a second full-time opera company, I don’t think it can sustain one organised on this basis. So I find myself edging towards the nuclear option: withdraw the grant-in-aid, find a profitable way to get rid of the Coliseum, shut the entire institution down, and start over from scratch.
Until 13 April, in repertory with Iolanthe and The Marriage of Figaro. Tickets: 0207 845 9300; www.eno.org