Lucrezia Borgia - review
Coliseum, London
As part of its already controversial policy to revitalise opera by asking directors from film and theatre to stage it, English National Opera has let Mike Figgis loose on Lucrezia Borgia, Donizetti's weird little thriller first performed in 1833.
The opera itself refashions renaissance history in terms of an oedipal psychodrama with pre-Freudian intimations. The eponymous heroine, part femme fatale, part serial poisoner, stalks a young man named Gennaro through the cities of Italy. He is flattered and aroused by the unknown woman's attentions, which he believes to be sexual.
She, however, is concealing from him not only her identity, but the fact that he is the illegitimate son she has always adored. Unsurprisingly, things get increasingly ghastly when the truth, bit by bit, begins to emerge.
Chronicler of dark and disturbing relationships in such films as Leaving Las Vegas and The Loss of Sexual Innocence, Figgis might seem the ideal person to tackle such material.
But he is new to opera, and what he offers is an amalgam of theatre and cinema that proves unwieldy in the extreme.
What we see on stage is a static, old-fashioned production of Donizetti's opera, played in period and reasonably straight, apart from a few quirks like a blasphemous nod in the direction of Leonardo's Last Supper for the banquet where Lucrezia poisons Gennaro's friends.
Woven between its scenes, however, are a sequence of short films, in which Figgis depicts the historical Lucrezia and what he believes, rightly or wrongly, to have been an abusive past at the hands of her father and brother.
This causes trouble on a number of accounts. Shot in a style somewhere between a glossy underwear advert and European arthouse, the films are basically erotica rather than serious docudrama.
More pertinently, the gap between Figgis's vision of the historical Lucrezia as inherently victimised and Donizetti's view of her as a self-willed monster redeemed by ma! ternal l ove is too great. Screen and stage pull against each other. Sexy though some of the films are, they're actually not really necessary.
Vocally, though, it's often sensational. Claire Rutter and Michael Fabiano are fabulous as the embattled mother and son.
She hurls out coloratura like spattered drops of venom. He sings with effortless beauty of tone and an exquisite sense of line.
There are equally strong performances from Alastair Miles as Lucrezia's appalling husband Alfonso, and Elizabeth DeShong as Gennaro's chum Orsini, strikingly played as a female-to-male transvestite rather than as a young man. It's finely conducted by Paul Daniel, too.
Rating: 2/5
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