Royal Opera’s Maria Stuarda: pathos and nobility from Joyce DiDonato, lazy nonsense from the directors

London is lucky to have heard Joyce DiDonato at the height of her powers in two consecutive seasons. The American mezzo has arguably done less well out of the arrangement, however, finding herself at the centre of two disappointing new productions. Last year it was Rossini’s La Donna del Lago, an intractable non-drama which John Fulljames’s staging (sponsored by Harris Tweed) turned into an unconvincing treatise on constructions of Scottish nationalism.

This season it’s Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda — similarly, if even more obliquely, concerned with Anglo–Scottish relations. Based more on Schiller than on actual history, it might have plenty of bel canto padding, but it presents a director with much less of a challenge, revolving as it does around two scenes — the famous and famously invented confrontation between Maria and Elisabetta I, and an extended finale for Maria as she awaits her execution — that ooze drama and pathos. Thankfully, not even Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier’s half-hearted, half-baked new Royal Opera production could fully defuse those scenes’ power. But that shouldn’t detract from how lazy and lacking in conviction the French pair’s effort felt.

Its main feature was to have the queens in full Tudor garb — an exaggerated, wide-load farthingale in the case of Elisabetta — but transplanted into a modern world of grey-suited men. The opening Act 1 scene 1 plays out, in Christian Fenouillat’s set, against a hazy backdrop of the Palace of Westminster, Elisabetta delivering her opening aria as if addressing a press conference. Instead of the multiple locations called for, the remaining one-and-a-half acts are confined to a grey prison, to predictably dull and nonsensical effect. When Maria appears, instead of soaking up the beautiful outdoors one last time, she is shown a slide show of countryside images.