Rigoletti
Rodney Milnes
Rigoletto (Scottish Opera) Rigoletto (Kent Opera) Both these productions ignored the recommendation `Epoca, il secolo XVI' printed at the front of Verdi's score, yet they could hardly be more different. Jonathan Miller's staging for Kent Opera, on tour at Sadler's Wells, plumps for 1851, the year of composition — a perfectly valid exercise; the young American director David Alden chooses a weird mixture of periods from Cosi fan tutte (the Ceprano family) to Fellini-punk (almost everyone else), with Marullo unaccountably dressed as Schaunard and some court ladies straying in from David Pountney's Zauberflote. Rigoletto himself is a clown, with red fright-wig and the tails of his coat trailing behind him. The opening is certainly arresting, with the Duke and the gentlemen of the chorus all in shiny imitation leather trousers, skimpy waistcoats (no vests) and top hats, a-swishing their riding crops lasciviously, and most of the ladies in various states of undress. This was unmistakably an orgy, with most of it (but not enough) mercifully taking place in the wings. It resembled what I imagine Studio 54 to be like to judge from Taki's interesting colurnn.
Gilda and her father live in West-SideStory-land: high wire fence, washing on the line, a Brecht draw-curtain. As may be becoming apparent, understatement is not a weapon in Mr Alden's armoury; Monterone is strung up on a chandelier at the end of the first scene, and is led to execution in a state of bescourgement that makes Griinewald's Christ look like an adverbsment for baby talc. The second act is a welter of broken statuary and corrugated iron. Could it possibly be that Mr Alden is — oh, so tentatively — suggesting that the court of Mantua is in a state of, um, decadence? I searched in vain through the programme to see if he had studied opera production in East Germany, but no; off-Broadway (Goclspell) and Coco Beach, Florida seem to have been the compost from which his talent has flowered. Talented he undoubtedly is, but the depressing thing is that this extraordinary spectacle has virtually nothing to do with Rigoletto. Verdi's opera is not about the decadence or otherwise of the court of Mantua, and the Duke is only — whisper it not to any passing tenor — a supporting character.
What the opera is about was, as ever, made painfully clear in Dr Miller's production. The opening scene could almost be set at Windsor Castle, with the minuet turned into a waltz and the Perigordienne into a Highland reel. Punks behaving badly is hardly news; respectable courtiers and rulers talking off-handedly about rape, kidnapping and summary execution is rather more interesting, but again, it is best swiftly got out of the way and on to the matter in hand: the relationship between Rigoletto and his daughter, which is drawn by Dr Miller and his singers with horribly painful directness. In Scotland it is simply swamped by the hysterical background (until the last act, which starts to work, too late) and only Norma Burrowes (Gilda) gets much mileage out of her role.
Brent Ellis, a fine lyric baritone, does not command the vocal overdrive needed for Rigoletto, and although Neil Shicoff has all the notes for the Duke, he does disappointingly little with them. Gillian Knight (Maddalena), clothed from ankle to Adam'sapple in demure black, was the sexiest thing on stage. The opera was sung in Italian, luckily for Mr Alden in that the direct contradiction between words and action in the second act was less obvious. There were no Italians in the cast. The chorus was marvellous, the sets (David Fielding) and costumes (Alex Reid) beautifully executed, but what a monument to misapplied energy the evening was. The production team was gently booed.
In contrast to all that was going on in front of his eyes, Alexander Gibson conducted rather too respectably, but allowed the singers to throw in unwritten high notes. For Kent, Roger Norrington conducted Verdi only, and with incision and guts. Jonathan Summers's Rigoletto was more broadly drawn than when the Miller production was new nearly four years ago but not a whit less powerful and Meryl Drower's Gilda, still with that affecting catch in her tone, more vulnerable than ever. After the rape, she appears simply with the back of her dress undone; poor Miss Burrowes had been got up as a tart in the process of her deflowering. The former said it all, the latter said nothing. In the nature of things, the punk Rigoletto will, I suppose, have to be revived (ohne mich); Kent's severe once-only-revival policy means that Dr Miller's has gone for ever. There will never be another quite like it.
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