A succession of women, all dressed in exquisite 1950s gowns, walk eagerly into the hotel room of Don Giovanni (a charismatic Christopher Purves). They’re excited and ready for fun and each comes out with a smile on her face. Then Donna Anna (Caitlin Lynch) turns up, and the tables are turned.She gets Giovanni to put on a mask and play out a rape scenario with her. When her father The Commendatore (James Creswell) bursts in, Giovanni stabs him in the groin and kills him.It’s a sly and intriguing beginning to Richard Jones’s lively new staging at English National Opera, which initially seems to promise a fresh reading of the score fueled by fears of female sexual agency. Designer Paul Steinberg adds to the neurotic effect with a disorienting and deliberately uncomfortable set made up from sliding panels painted in a queasy olive-greeny-brown. Hotel corridors, claustrophobic bedrooms, and oddly-lit outdoor spaces morph into each other quickly and easily.As the plot proceeds, the returns of such an approach become slightly patchier. Mozart’s music for Donna Anna presents an anguished, sympathetic character; here, in order to make sense of what she says, you have to believe she’s either a vicious hypocrite, or an amnesiac, or just plain bonkers. A counter-intuitive staging can work well, of course, but in this case a touch more variety would help. Instead we have a twitchy, near-psychotic Donna Elvira (Christine Rice), a brutish Masetto (Nicholas Crawley), a mendacious Zerlina (Mary Bevan) and an unhinged Leporello (Clive Bayley). There are exciting moments with some mordent laughs, and there’s a final unexpected twist in keeping with the cruel-comic tone of the production. But it doesn’t quite get to the strange heart of Mozart’s ‘dramma giocoso.’Mark Wigglesworth keeps things fast and fleet in the pit (sometimes too much so: there were problems with accuracy in the performance I saw) and some of the singing is very fine. Christine Rice has never sounded more luscious or melting, and Caitlyn Lynch negotiates the fearsome demands of Anna’s music with real panache.It may not ultimately deliver what it promises, but there’s plenty to beguile and provoke along the way.“Don Giovanni” is in repertoire at English National Opera until October 26. Information: www.eno.org
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