OPERA
Sober seraglio
RODNEY ivillAsTEs
After his thoughtful production of Cosi fan tutte for the Royal Opera, it was only to be expected that John Cop- ley might take a fairly solemn view of The Seraglio, which he has now mounted for Sad- ler's Wells Opera at the Coliseum. There is cer- tainly room for thought about this work, which is customarily played as a sprightly musical comedy. The hero, after all, is not so much the stuffy Spanish feline premier, son of an unjust father, who lies his way into the Pasha's palace and then tries to bribe his way out of it, as the heathen Pasha himself, whose noble clemency would have been remarkable even in the most en- lightened of those eighteenth-century rulers whose court theatres would have been likely to play Mozart's comedy—and all this less than 100 years after the nearly successful Turkish siege of Vienna.
So in this production it is the weightier elements that come off best. I have never seen the quasi-concert-aria `Martern aller Arten', long introduotion and all, so con- vincingly handled as a dramatic confronta- tion, and the final duet, in which the lovers' greeting of death attains almost Tristan-like proportions, was quite properly the climax.
Nevertheless, the chief function of Seraglio has always been to entertain, and it is the sense of sheer fun that is lacking here. What there is comes mainly from Richard Van Allen's fine Osmin, though his comically sadistic revenge aria is given a slightly sour flavour by his having to sing it at the objects of his vengeance rather than straight out at the audience—an intentional effect, I'm sure, bitt a misplaced one. Norma Burrowes's Blonda gets plenty of laughs out of her Englishness (Edmund Tracey's free re- working of the text gives her the tea joke, amongst others) but John Fryatt's flat- vowelled Pedrillo, about as Spanish as the Mile End Road, is strangely charmless. Alexander Young sang Belmonte with his usual style, but Lois McDonall had a little trouble getting up to some of Constanze's notes—a passing problem I suspect.
Stefanos Lazari•dis, the designer, has a wonderful sense of colour. The counter- point between the predominantly brown beige of the sets and the deftly disposed splashes of colour in the costumes—Osmin's green and red, Pedrillo's turquoise and the quiet blue for Constanze and the Pasha in Act 2—is subtle and effective. But I think the decor as a whole is dangerously over- elaborate for so lightly textured a comedy, which is in danger of being smothered by so many changes of costume and setting. (And it must, needlessly, have cost a bomb; at a time when taxpayers are sensitive about production costs it is scarcely tactful to print in the programme elaborate working drawings for props which could have been knocked up from street market gleanings for next to nothing.) Thus the third act, which is traditionally got out of the way as swiftly as possible, was given extra substance by opening with the usually (and rightly) cut 'Loh baue ganz' and then setting the final
scene in the harem itself, complete with lounging odalisques. The contrast between the ecstatically constant lovers and the in- different ladies of the harem may have been a point worth making, but the appearance of the lightly-clad Pasha, obviously inter- rupted in mid-cuddle, did not exactly attest to the seriousness of his passion for Con- stanze, and the subsequent entry of the entire male household suggested such poor Seraglio security as to sabotage the plot.
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