The eyes have it | 23 June 2016

Tchaikovsky knew what he thought of the title character of his Eugene Onegin. ‘I loved Tatyana, and was furiously indignant with Onegin who seemed to me a cold, heartless fop,’ he wrote to a friend; and directors, by and large, have been happy to leave it at that. And why not? Dishy but emotionally unavailable Regency dandies have been a growth area in recent years — blame it on Colin Firth, if you like — and Eugene Onegin is probably the standard repertoire opera you’re least likely to see subjected to a directorial updating, in the UK at any rate.

Michael Boyd’s new production at Garsington certainly doesn’t update anything. Fans of the Jane Austen tendency will find riding boots and empire-line dresses galore, while for the St Petersburg ball scenes designer Tom Piper musters a parade of glittering tiaras and gold-braided uniforms worthy of the BBC’s recent War and Peace — looking all the more gorgeous since by then the audience has had dinner and the daylight that streams in on either side of the Garsington stage has faded to something a bit more atmospheric. There’s nothing here to upset any traditionalist; even an elaborate dream-ballet in which dancers form the shapes of ships and stagecoaches received appreciative applause.

In fact, Boyd is doing something far more radical, and it all centres on Roderick Williams’s performance as Onegin. And Natalya Romaniw’s Tatyana too, of course, though that’s a given. I’ve never seen an Onegin given equal depth, but that’s what Williams achieves here. Both he and Tatyana are dressed in black, alone in the colourful world around them, and while it’s unsurprising to find Tatyana sighing into a book, it’s rare to get such a sense of the inner life behind Onegin’s jaded exterior.