Director Joe Hill-Gibbins made his ENO debut in March 2020 with this production, but COVID shut it down after one performance, so this in theory is a revival, which will be new to most in the audience.
The first surprise is the blank canvas bare staging, against which the protagonists pose and present themselves during the overture. Hill-Gibbins says he likes to strip down and simplify, especially a plotline as twisting as The Marriage of Figaro. Secondly he is aiming for a commedia dell’arte style, the breaking of the fourth wall.
For some reason, I think Gilbert and Sullivan nudge-nudge, wink-wink, though my companion pooh-poohs that. And of Cheek by Jowl productions, most recently Life is a Dream, with its array of doors, at the Barbican.
In a white ‘brutalist’ picture box frame set with four functioning doors—useful in any farce—with no set or props apart from a dress hanging on the wall, twelve performers plus a chorus have to be actors, singers and décor, a mobile frieze or frozen bas-relief. But where to hide… behind the doors… one frequently has to suspend one’s disbelief when characters are visible, plastered against that white wall, to us but invisible to other protagonists.
Such fun. Director Joe Hill-Gibbins highlights the first half (the crazy day) of Beaumarchais’s title for his 1778 play, considered subversive in its time, La folle journée, ou Le marriage de Figaro. And the day is comic manic, when an upstairs-downstairs attempt at sex is cleverly thwarted.
You know the outline… randy Count Almaviva wants to reintroduce droit du seigneur, so he can have it off with Susanna, his wife’s servant, about to marry Figaro, his servant. He’s not the only one who is sex-mad. It must be infectious. Or is it simply testosterone… Cherubino, his page, is turned on by every young female...
That’s the crux of the central plot, though there is a subplot with Marcellina, Dr Bartolo’s housekeeper, wanting to marry Figaro, who turns out to be her long-lost, kidnapped son and Bartolo his father. Crazy, indeed. Susanna and the Countess swap clothes to expose the Count at a rendezvous with Susanna.
Twists and turns, but it’s less complicated than the thrust of the libretto makes one think. Jeremy Sams’s vernacular English translation is excellent and clear, and for once I don't miss the opera not being in the original language. The singers’ body language (movement and associate director Jenny Ogilvie) signals loud and clear.
The chorus plays many parts, as well as bolstering the concept of love. Matthew Richardson’s lighting, pink, lilac and green, saturates the white set at appropriate times. Lilac for love; green for I’m not sure for what, biliousness? And red.
Co-produced with Oper Wuppertal—it premièred there in 2019—it has something of that European ‘director’s theatre’ ‘meta’ concept about it. Johannes Schütz’s set design is stark. The box frame contains the action until it doesn't. Performers step out of it and sit on its lower step.
When the container is on the ground, it is the lower servants’ quarters. It rises (hydraulic lift) to a first floor, the master’s quarters. Well, Cherubino needs to be able to jump out of a window into the garden. Then back to the ground when a garden is needed. The box is pulled back by stagehands and the front of the bare stage is the garden where assignations are meant to happen. It could just as well be a semi-staged production, fascinating though it is.
What redeem it are the marvellous singers. Soprano Nardus Williams (Fiordiligi in ENO’s 2022 Così fan tutte) as Countess Almaviva, is outstanding: her two arias are very warmly greeted. Soprano Mary Bevan’s Susanna is a delight; bass-baritone David Ireland’s Figaro wins me over; and mezzo Hanna Hipp’s (also in Così with Williams) Cherubino is incredibly convincing in a breeches role.
Soprano Rebecca Evans (Marcellina) and bass-baritone Neal Davies (Bartolo, and I might add recently Sergeant Meryll in Yeomen of the Guard here) are ENO regulars, comfortable on the stage. Cody Quattlebaum (of the luscious hair), American baritone, on the other hand, is making his ENO debut as the entitled Count Almaviva. He has terrific stage presence and a Singspiel delivery.
I’ve not yet mentioned Antonio the gardener (Trevor Eliot Bowes) and his daughter Barbarina (ENO Harewood Artist Ava Dodd), another one of the Count’s sweeties, or Don Basilio, whom Hubert Francis plays as sleaze-ball—he also doubles as the stuttering lawyer, Don Curzio.
The eighteenth century, like that sliding box, has been brought forward to an indeterminate time, a timeless time. But it’s Mozart’s music and vivacity that transcends time. I can barely sit still. The orchestra, under Ainārs Rubiķis, is at the service of the singers. Three hours plus fly by. A happy evening.