Opera Ireland does Don Giovanni

Donna Elvira and Leporello (Image courtesy of Opera Ireland)

Mozart’s Don Giovanni opened Opera Ireland’s 2009 Spring season in the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, last night (full cast details are on Opera Ireland’s website).  Having seen some pretty ugly shows from OI in the past, it was quite bizarre to see one that went so far in the opposite direction.  This show is pretty to look at, generally well-sung and played, but theatrically oddly inert.  Was this intended?  After all, Don Giovanni was best-known as a puppet-show in 18th-c Austria and Italy before Mozart and his strange friend Da Ponte turned it into an opera.  And the almost mechanistic callousness of Don G and Leporello do have a puppet-like violence to them…

In Jean-Louis Grinda’s whimsical production this two-dimensionality does indeed seem to be the level that is being aimed at.  My companion loved it, while I found it tedious and superficial, so I’m not saying that it’s impossible to like… but I couldn’t help thinking that the production team just missed things, a whole bunch of things.  The performers wander about the stage, only vaguely connected with each other, the dramaturgy is lazy, character and motivation only generally hinted at.  It was a costumed concert.  Or it was an apt reconstruction of the late-18th-c mindset.  Knowing the brutality of the libretto and the depth of the music, it is hard to accept such a superficial con-job of a production, unless we accept that their concept was one based on the sensibility of contemporary decorative illustration, and leave it at that.  If you like your Don Giovanni spicy, intense and politically-aware, though, then you’ll probably want to give this a wide berth.  It was also irritating that the production seemed (I can only say seemed – nothing was very clear) to patronise the character of Donna Anna, making it seem that Don G never really attacked her after all, as if she made it all up.  Umm, why?

Having said that, the music is very well performed.  It’s great to see Cara O’Sullivan on stage again, and she sang a beautiful Donna Anna.  Her Don Ottavio (Paolo Fanale) is also a real find – so often you get rather limp Ottavios (the role desn’t help, admittedly) that it was great to have it sung strongly and well by such a seriously promising tenor.