Get me to an opera house

In anyone’s hands, Verdi’s Aida is not the easiest opera to raise up to greatness on the stage. How does a director spotlight hidden subtleties, musical or dramatic, in a libretto and subject so easily swamped by the spectacle of marching breastplates, roaring divas, Egyptian bling and the aroma and sway of live camels? Novice audiences may have their own problems, grappling with characters named Aida, Amneris, Amonasro, Radamès, Ramfis — almost always A and R. If only the librettist, Antonio Ghislanzoni, had called someone Doris.

Imagine, then, the difficulties faced when the opera is performed by Opera Australia on a wide-open platform, built over water, at this year’s Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour. This filmed record, in UK cinemas for one evening only on 15 September, offers a vivid document of the company’s struggle to bring Verdi’s Egyptian monster to heel. Stage director Gale Edwards may initially have had those subtleties in mind. But they can hardly surface in an unfocused production where the garishly costumed cast are easily dwarfed by the stage’s huge Nefertiti-like head, useless stacks of oil drums, and a night sky that twinkles with skyscrapers. The vast performing space is at least convenient for Lucas Jervies’s ballets, even when they suggest we’ve dropped into one of those dodgy nightclubs formerly frequented by Prince Harry. But it’s terrible for Radamès and Aida’s last tender moments in a stifling vault. What vault?

Extra disenchantment arrives with the film’s ruthless sound design, scrubbed clean of all the ambient noises, even footsteps, that might convey that the performance you’re watching has been recorded live. Instead, voices and Brian Castles-Onion’s orchestra (beavering away under the stage) exist in a weird vacuum. Low on tension at first, Latonia Moore’s Aida increases in power and emotional throb as the opera proceeds.