Eurotrash Verdi: ENO’s Luisa Miller reviewed

Verdi’s Luisa Miller is set in the Tyrol in the early 17th century, and for some opera directors that’s a problem. After all, they’re busy people. They probably never had time to read Wolf Hall, or to speak to any of the 100 million people worldwide who watched Game of Thrones. It’s self-evident to them that modern audiences will be unable to empathise with anything involving swords, castles or feudal hierarchies. Which is why they work hard to imagine new contexts that can make these hopelessly dated dramas address contemporary life as we live it, right here, right now. Counts, village maidens and men in ruffs? Baffling. But a clown strapped to a gyrating crucifix being stabbed with arrows by a group of dancers in flesh-coloured swimming caps and black fetish wear? Now that’s relatable.

In fairness, not everything in Barbora Horakova’s new production for ENO is quite so Eurotrash. The stark white sets, the presence of children to evoke the characters’ lost innocence and the final image of a trickling, encroaching blackness as Luisa and Rodolfo face death — there were ideas here that sort of worked, if intermittently. Let’s be clear: there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with abstraction, relocation or outright surrealism in opera. What intelligent opera-lover wouldn’t rather engage with a production by, say, Katie Mitchell or Netia Jones, than yawn through some overcooked Zeffirelli revival? What matters, in the end, is whether a director opens up an opera’s dramatic possibilities, or whether they shut them down.

Throughout Horakova’s Luisa Miller, you felt the drama being stunted or obscured; being made less than it could be, and certainly a lot more simplistic than it might have been with musical performances as tremendous as these.