Committed performances – but who was the granny? Northern Ireland Opera’s Eugene Onegin reviewed

It’s a critic’s job to pick holes in the dafter aspects of opera productions, but in truth audiences are usually capable of detecting nonsense when they see it. ‘She must be at least 150,’ commented the gentleman sitting behind me, referring to the wheelchair-bound old lady who was trundled on stage at the start of Northern Ireland Opera’s new production of Eugene Onegin, and then parked there, pretty much for the duration.

He had a point. Was she meant to be an elderly Tatyana? Then why was she dressed in modern clothes when the rest of the action played out in the era of Pushkin? Why had she been abandoned in a derelict warehouse (superbly realised, complete with breezeblocks, water stains and metal ducting)? What were her carers doing, when they weren’t inserting themselves into the choreographed crowd scenes? And why hadn’t the poor old dear’s family reported them to the official watchdog?

So many questions, so few of them having anything to do with Eugene Onegin. True, the opera deals with the sorrows of youth as perceived through the eyes of experience, but Tchaikovsky already provides senior viewpoints: Madame Larina, Filipyevna, Prince Gremin. Further layers are superfluous, and at worst (as happened here in Tatyana’s letter scene) they’re an outright distraction. Obviously, there’s no definitive way to stage an opera: what matters is whether the director’s concept opens up the drama’s possibilities, or closes them down. This production by NIO’s artistic director Cameron Menzies – or at least those aspects of it, the old lady and the empty warehouse – seemed to do neither.

That was a pity, because this Tatyana (Mary McCabe) was particularly touching; impetuous and shy in the early scenes and singing with a lovely mixture of fragility and ardour.