Aggressively jaded: Edinburgh’s Marriage of Figaro reviewed 

‘Boo!’ came a voice from the stalls. ‘Boo. Outrage!’ It was hard not to feel a pang of admiration. British opera audiences don’t tend to boo; we’re either too polite or too unengaged. But there we were in Act Three of Kirill Serebrennikov’s production of The Marriage of Figaro – just after the scene where Susanna, the Count and the Countess enjoy a three-in-a-bed romp while singing the trio ‘Soave sia il vento’ – and at least one person felt passionate enough to raise his voice.

Obviously, there’s no such trio in The Marriage of Figaro. It had been prised from Cosi fan tutte and shoehorned into the antics chez Almaviva: one of several dream sequences inserted by Serebrennikov in pursuit of his hard-hitting thesis – articulated through a neon-lit slogan at the back of the set – that ‘Capitalism Kills Love’. Bold stuff; so shocking that the Edinburgh audience (and it’s never been hard to distinguish between Edinburgh opera-goers and the Baader-Meinhof Group) had mostly been applauding with the utmost courtesy. Even – no, especially – when Cherubino (Georgy Kudrenko) pulled off his Y-fronts and leaped, butt-naked, out of the window.

In fairness, Berlin’s Komische Oper is currently one of the most interesting European opera companies. No one can have expected a vanilla Figaro from this source, and the cast was clearly at ease with Serebrennikov’s interventionist approach: a spirited, edgy Susanna (Penny Sofroniadou), a handsome-sounding Figaro (Peter Kellner) and a Countess (Verity Wingate) who sang with sustained sweetness and poignancy. The orchestra was buoyant under James Gaffigan, who did not deserve the second bout of (more widespread) booing that he received at the curtain call. Possibly they mistook him for the director.