OPERA
Onegin no tonic
RODNEY MILNES
This is a good month for those who believe in opera as drama. Following Sadler's Wells's approachable Twilight•of the Gods, the Royal Opera have given us Tchaikov- sky's Eugene Onegin not, as at Glynde- bourne, in the indecent obscurity of the Russian language, but in David Lloyd- Jones's fluent, simple and discreetly rhymed. new translation: symptomatic, I trust, along with the disappearance of the prompt box, of the new regime's policy.
I hate to disappoint Tony Palmer, but there are no nudes in Peter Hall's production. That would at least have livened up what was in some ways a curiously flat evening. I say 'curiously' because the work is enorm- ously dramatic, and the talents of both Hall and Georg Solti usually tend in that direc- tion. The flatness is largely due to the serious miscasting of the title role: Victor Braun captures neither Onegin's coldly remote façade nor the desperation that lies behind it—the character becomes charmless, clumsy and chummy, a sort of boor-next-door.
The Tatiana of Ileana Cotrubas is quite the opposite: a touching and beautifully observed performance on the same sort of dramatic level as (and physically reminiscent of) Anna Calder Marshall's memorable Sonia in Uncle Vanya at the Royal Court last year. Miss Cotrubas can sing quite adequately, too, and the fact that this Romanian soprano has learnt the role in English in order to sing it here is not, perhaps, without signifi- cance for the future. But however excellent the Tatiana, Tchaikovsky's masterpiece stands or falls on the tortured relationships of the three central characters, and with Braun's bland Onegin and Robert Tear giVing very much a singer's performance as Lensky, it falls. There are incidental pleasures in Noreen Berry's Nurse and Pamela Bowden's Madame Larina, and in the fact that Mr Hall and Geoffrey Cauley have between them sorted out the dancing: there was not a whiff of 'opera ballet' about either the peasants' Act 1 routine or the formal dances later on. All were smoothly integrated into the, action.
But Mr Hall is sadly displaying symptoms of extra-itis, a disease that has been known to strike, amongst others, Visconti, who allowed a female supernumerary to steal too much of Act 1 in his Traviata. Here we have a physically distinctive male extra who is a peasant in Act 1, a guest in Act 2, the major domo in Act 3, and extremely distracting in all three. There are some problems, too, in the relationship between chorus and prin- cipals—a serious matter if you choose to take a naturalistic line with romantic opera. What do you do with the peasants during Olga's Act 1 aria (they freeze) or the guests while Lensky and Olga quarrel in Act 2? The chorus's cry of 'who can tell us what has happened' is less than convincing if they have plainly heard every word.
If Julia Trevelyan Oman were ever to design sets for me, I would confiscate first her passport and then her camera. Slavish attention to authentic period detail is no substitute for constructive ideas on how to present opera visually. If you cannot afford the minute realism of the first scene through- out the opera, then why not do it another way altogether instead of bunging on the bits you can afford (Tatiana's bed. Madame Larina's staircase) and blocking the rest of the stage off with beige masking flats. A room whose walls wobble when even as petite a heroine as Miss Cotrubas exits is clearly insupportable, and argues strongly for a complete rethinking of visual style. It would be a richly deserved compliment to Tchai- kovsky if the imagination, say, with which' Svoboda approached Pelleas, were brought to bear on Onegin.
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