Heartfelt and thought-provoking: Eugene Onegin, at the Royal Opera, reviewed

The curtain is already up at the start of Ted Huffman’s new production of Eugene Onegin. The auditorium is lit but the stage is in darkness and almost bare. Gradually, as Tchaikovsky’s prelude sighs and unfurls, the stage brightens and the theatre grows dim. But not before Onegin (Gordon Bintner) – tousle-headed and in a designer suit – has walked out, bowed to the house and retired to a chair at the back of the stage, to wait for the story to call him to life.

Any competent maestro can whip up a big noise, but it’s a lot harder to make meaning out of silence

Russophiles have grumbled for years about the way Tchaikovsky trimmed and tidied Pushkin’s raffish first-person narrative into seven self-contained ‘lyrical scenes’. From the start, Huffman seems determined to tug and tear at those graceful patchwork pieces; to unpick the opera’s relationship with its source material, and with us, its audience. The setting (if you can call it that) is determinedly contemporary and monochrome. There’s swirling mist instead of scenery and everything plays out against one of those black backdrops that look cool in the production photos but give you eyestrain over the course of an evening.

Still, there’s method in all this minimalism: it throws the focus wholly on to the characters and here, Huffman is superb. These are performances filled with living, heartbreaking expression. Tatyana’s features become a mask as Onegin delivers his rebuff at the end of Act One (surely the iciest friend-zoning in all of opera). Amusement, mortification and pain flicker across Bintner’s face as he tries to talk Lensky (Liparit Avetisyan) down from his fatal tantrum. The countless little glances, gestures and smiles that flow between the women of the Larin household are a masterclass in delicate naturalism.