Homework, not theatre: WNO’s Cosi fan tutte reviewed

Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte hasn’t always been taken seriously. In fact for much of the 19th century it wasn’t even reckoned to be very good (Donald Tovey described its characters as ‘humanly speaking, rubbish’). For the modern director, there are several potential approaches. One – the hardest – is to try and evoke in the audience an approximation of a late-18th-century mindset. Another, scarcely easier, is to go all-in on psychological subtlety – the path taken by Tim Albery in the current Opera North production. A third is simply to play the whole thing as a saucy romp with a beautiful score, and that’s the choice that Max Hoehn has taken in his new staging for the Welsh National Opera.

Hoehn has one major new insight. Noticing that the opera’s subtitle is ‘The School for Lovers’, he’s set the whole thing in – wait for it, because this is how directors earn their money – a school. Literally: there are desks and a blackboard, and Ferrando (Egor Zhuravskii) and Guglielmo (James Atkinson) wear blazers and shorts. Their fiancées (who in this set-up can’t be more than sixteen) are also in school uniform, and Fiordiligi (Sophie Bevan) is the smarter of the two. Dorabella (Kayleigh Decker) is more careless; her socks are around her ankles. Don Alfonso (Jose Fardilha) is a Bash Street Kids headmaster in mortarboard and gown, and Despina (Rebecca Evans) is a dinner-lady. Enormous anatomical drawings of reproductive organs (human and other) dangle over the scene.

I mean… it’s not just me, is it? Sure, attitudes to teenage sexuality vary with time and place. When I taught in Sri Lanka in the 1990s, Colombo 7 playboys in hulking SUVs would queue to collect their pinafored and pigtailed girlfriends, straight from class.