What a jumble

Michael Tanner

Wednesday, 1st July 2009

The Abduction from the Seraglio
Opera North

Un Ballo in Maschera
Royal Opera House

As I took my seat for Act II of Opera North’s new production of Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio, the woman sitting next to me — we hadn’t met — said, ‘Have you any idea what’s going on in this opera?’ and I said I hadn’t, at any rate in this production. Everyone agrees that Mozart’s dramatic sense deserted him quite extensively in Seraglio, but it was left to the director Tim Hopkins, who was also responsible for the designs, to remove whatever dramatic impetus the work has and to come up with something that is as hopelessly messy to follow as it is to look at. The sets, especially the first one, are a jumble of styles, cluttered, apparently designed for a play within a play, but that isn’t worked through, and awkward for the performers to negotiate at the same time as they try to relate to one another. Ineptitude of this order is unusual on the professional operatic stage; normally one has calculated more or less competent perversity.

Tim Hopkins and his colleague Nicholas Ridout decided to rewrite the piece extensively too, the first indication of that being the appearance before the curtain of a figure Mozart culpably omitted from his opera, the Mute, a spoken part, garrulous — a laugh there, of course — telling us what we don’t want to know and threading her way through the action alternately as a Western tour-guide and as an Eastern of indeterminate function. Hopkins wants us to be clearer than we would otherwise be that this is about Orientalism, and Edward Said’s eponymous, exploded book on the subject is quoted in the programme. So the Pasha, whose ‘tragicall history’ this is, is a depressed gentleman who, as played by Martin Hyder, seems to be closely modelled on Michael Caine’s part in Hannah and her Sisters. In love with Constanze, he remains the soul of lugubrious courtesy throughout, so that when she rounds on him with Mozart’s hugest, most boring aria, ‘Martern aller Arten’, he looks as bewildered as the audience feels, since he hasn’t threatened anything, so her interminable list of ways she will defy him is superfluous. All the more odd, since Hopkins has decided to add interest by having Constanze nearly falling in love with him, though this new twist fizzles out very soon, and should never have fizzled in.

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