There’s no such thing as a tasteful rape scene — or there certainly shouldn’t be. It’s an act of grossest violation, of primal violence. It’s also a reality — and a growing one at that — of contemporary warfare, a ‘weapon’ increasingly deployed strategically, coolly, by armies rather than individuals. Setting his new production of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell in the Balkan conflict of the 1990s, director Damiano Michieletto puts the issue front and centre in a scene whose music was almost lost on opening night in the extraordinary and unprecedented chorus of boos and catcalls from the audience.
The booers have ensured all conversation about the production is reduced to this one scene; ‘Gang rape and nudity at the Royal Opera House’, read the headlines. They aren’t wrong; the production is a bad one and the scene is unprompted either by music or libretto, but it’s still the wrong conversation.
That the debate, as it currently rages, centres on the acceptability of depicting rape on stage at all is worrying — a prudish self-censorship that places audience comfort above all, missing, or denying, the point of art. That some seem more concerned with the manner of its depiction — ‘gratuitous nudity’ is a phrase that has come up a lot — is even more worrying. No amount of euphemistic skirt-fumblings and decorous fadings-to-black (How naked is too naked?) can, or should, make it palatable.
Let’s talk instead about how Michieletto’s production — lazy in concept, violently ugly in execution — doesn’t earn the extremity of that scene. There’s an emotional and dramatic void at the core of the show, partly born of Rossini’s ponderous score (which has moments of astonishing beauty and drama, unfortunately stitched together into a rather unwieldy whole), but mostly sucked hollow by a director who misunderstands his material.
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