A brutal Father Superior flings the weeping heroine to the ground, and wraps her head in barbed wire. The lead baritone beats up innocent members of the chorus. Even Friar Melitone – usually portrayed as a comical character – grinds a woman’s face into the dirt, before slapping her in a psychopathic frenzy.Life isn’t a bowl of cherries for the characters in Calixto Bieito’s production of “The Force of Destiny” by Verdi.The brutality isn’t inappropriate: Verdi’s tale of a monomaniac marquis who pursues his disgraced sister and her lover across Europe involves a shooting, a war, and a duel, and ends in a top-notch operatic bloodbath. But where Verdi’s music offers light, warmth and even comedy to offset the violence, Bieito gives us only darkness. It feels like short-selling.It doesn’t help that the violence is mostly of that rather contrived, unconvincing kind which you only ever see on opera stages. When a frenzied random attack is stretched out to last for eight bars of lovely melody – and then repeated for the next eight bars – it doesn’t quite create the frisson of horror which the director presumably intends it should. It’s a case of square pegs and round holes.Bieito’s monochrome concept of the work continues into Rebecca Ringst’s sets - a series of sliding stucco house-facades – which are kept in obscurity and gloom by Tim Mitchell’s woefully Stygian lighting. In some scenes, it’s hard to tell who’s singing.Once or twice the staging hits the bull’s-eye. Bieito updates the story to the Spanish Civil War, and depicts the mezzo Preziosilla (a fine Rinat Shaham) as a soldier’s widow. When she lines up a group of her Republican enemies and shoots them in the head, one by one, in the manner of an ISIS atrocity, it strikes a chord of recognition lacking in the other moments of horror.Continuing the plus-points, soprano Tamara Wilson uses her gleaming, ample soprano sound to sing up a Verdian storm as the heroine Leonora, and James Creswell provides impressive Wagnerian oomph as Father Superior. Tenor Gwyn Hughes Jones does a good job too in the demanding role of Alvaro and conductor Mark Wigglesworth is excellent in the pit: the playing is vital and energetic. Baritone Anthony Michaels-Moore (Don Carlo) sounded unfortunately sandpapery and hoarse on press night.But it’s the unconvincing brutality which lingers, and the reduction of Verdi’s varied score to mere contrived violence.Depicting brutality is an art. Quentin Tarantino needn’t worry just yet.“The Force of Destiny” is at the Coliseum.
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