Losing heart | 29 September 2016

The subtitle for Mozart’s Così fan tutte may be ‘The School For Lovers’, but it’s as a school for directors that the opera is most instructive. From four lovers and two different romantic pairings, the composer spins a parable whose moral is as elusive as its morals. Faced with so much ambiguity (and so little political correctness) directors tend either to sand down the rough edges with laughs, or fling a capacious concept over the whole lot. It says something about the awkward profundity of this most inscrutable and affection-resistant of the Mozart-Da Ponte collaborations that it can take it. It says even more that you so rarely see an outstanding production.

While Christophe Honoré’s Così (seen this summer at both Aix and Edinburgh) ran headfirst at the opera’s misogyny, spicing its sexual manipulations with an unexpected racial dimension, Jan Philipp Gloger’s new production for the Royal Opera is interested much less in either sex or politics than in the seductions and illusions of opera itself.

His quartet of contemporary lovers make a late entrance to Act One, arriving through the auditorium clutching shiny red programmes and dressed for an evening in the stalls. It’s Don Alfonso (Johannes Martin Kränzle, all smiling menace) who beckons them on to the stage, welcoming them into a theatrical world in which he is ringmaster and magus, director and pander, conjuring sets and scenarios ranging from a Brief Encounter-style railway station and an art-deco bar to the Garden of Eden and an 18th-century theatre. Where does stage love end and real emotion begin? It’s a question worth asking, especially if your answer comes framed in Ben Baur’s stylish designs, but sadly Gloger’s answer falls short.

Together with dramaturg Katharina John, Gloger has evidently done a lot of thinking, and the resulting production is one long stream of directorial consciousness, proof that showing your working doesn’t get you extra marks in the theatre.