“It’s about sex, sex, sex” is how Christopher Purves describes Don Giovanni ahead of Richard Jones’s new production, in which he plays the title role. Actually, it’s about much more than that, examining the relationships between desire, privilege and power, and between existential self-definition, individual integrity and moral absolutes. Jones deals fitfully with its complexities in a staging that doesn’t always cohere.
It’s a chilly, unerotic interpretation pitched somewhere between a bedroom farce and Spanish surrealism, as if Feydeau has been reimagined by Buñuel. As so often, Jones has a fine eye for hypocrisies, presenting us with a portrait of a society that seemingly rents by the hour, often secretly, in a labyrinthine hotel-cum-brothel, where we find Purves’s brutal, calculating Giovanni indulging the BDSM fantasies of Anna (Caitlin Lynch), while the Commendatore (James Creswell) entertains a prostitute in an adjoining room. The narrative lurches into motion when Creswell is nastily dispatched with a knife Anna likes using in sex play. We’re already very far from Mozart.
What follows compounds insights with digressions. The balance of sympathies lies with Mary Bevan’s bewildered Zerlina, and Nicholas Crawley’s put-upon Masetto, their vacillating feelings for each other beautifully observed. Christine Rice’s Elvira is a neurotic obsessive, which sometimes flies in the face of the self-important music Mozart provides for her. As Anna’s guilt corrodes her relationship with Allan Clayton’s Ottavio, he is reduced to calling her repeatedly from the same phone box the Don uses for telephone sex.
At times, however, Jones distrusts the opera’s ambivalences and metaphysical questioning. By providing the Don and Anna with a back history, he narrows the ambiguities derived from Mozart’s withholding of the details of their previous encounter. There’s genuine brilliance in his treatment of the relationship between Purves and Clive Bayley’s wonderfully sardonic Leporello, the pair of them very much alter egos, capable of assuming each other’s identities in a flash. But we also notice a Leporello lookalike lurking among the Don’s lovers, whose significance only becomes apparent during Jones’s take on the final scene, which is clever, shocking and bitterly ironic, but swivels out of telling us what – or where – is hell.
Musically it’s strong, though Purves doesn’t always beguile or command as much as he might. Bayley is on tremendous form and Clayton sounds glorious throughout. The women are excellent. Rice blazes away thrillingly in her act two aria. Lynch is silver-toned and superbly accurate, and Jones’s unorthodox take lets her reveal levels of vulnerability that some interpreters miss. Bevan can be deeply touching, above all in her scenes with Crawley, who is outstanding in a role often under-cast and underplayed. Mark Wigglesworth conducts with elegance, drama and warmth, making some unusual tempo choices – the slower than usual second half of Batti, Batti, for instance – that are always insightful: a reminder, yet again, of what a loss to this company his recent resignation as music director is.
•In rep at the Coliseum, London, until 26 October. Box office: 020-7845 9300.
