ENO’s Indian Queen reviewed: Peter Sellars’s bold new production needs editing

When is an opera not an opera? How much can you strip and peel away, or extend and graft on to the genre, before it simply ceases to be itself? These questions dominated a week in which directors turned vivisectors for new productions — reimaginings — of Purcell’s Indian Queen (ENO) and Mozart’s Don Giovanni (Silent Opera).

Anyone familiar with Peter Sellars’s work will know better than to expect any paring back from the larger-than-life American. Amplification is the order of the day for Purcell’s semi-opera — expanded from a trim 50 minutes of unfinished music yoked to a play by Dryden and Howard to a three-and-a-half-hour musico-dramatic spectacle. If that sounds pretentious and portentous, then that’s about right.

Dryden is out, replaced by the living Nicaraguan author Rosario Aguilar. Extracts from The Lost Chronicles of Terra Firma (mesmerisingly spoken by the actress Maritxell Carrero) rewrite the original dynastic feud between Peru and Mexico as a colonial conflict between the Mayans and the Spanish conquistadors. A battle of equals becomes a rout, a portrait of colonial brutality and exploitation with the inter-race marriage of Don Pedro (Noah Stewart) and Teculihuatzin (a radiant Julia Bullock) as its emotional prism.

Colonialism is bad. As a message it’s unarguable, but also of limited dramatic interest. A tale of cruelty and horror (the half-time climax is a massacre) demands a pretty unvarying musical palette. Sellars summons all of Purcell’s minor-key music — arias, airs, sacred anthems — to his aid, creating a pasticcio score that extends from sorrowful (‘O solitude’) to tragic (‘Hear My Prayer’), with only the occasional foray into wistful. Where are the swift, joyful dance rhythms that are the heartbeat of baroque music?

Visually we’re in classic Sellars territory. Colourful canvases by the Chicano artist Gronk make big, primitive gestures, mirrored in Christopher Williams’s choreography (Rite of Spring by way of Rambert).