The musical vaccination we all needed: ETO’s Cosi fan tutte reviewed

Anyone familiar with Joe Hill-Gibbins’s work will brace instinctively when the curtain goes up on his new Figaro. He’s the young British director who smeared the Young Vic with jelly and custard (The Changeling) and transformed it into a giant mud pit (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), covered the Almeida in blood and more mud (The Tragedy of King Richard the Second) and bathed his cast in a stomach-turning blend of salad cream, ketchup and baked beans at the Edinburgh Festival (Greek).So when the curtain rises on a white-walled corridor whose sterile purity is broken up only by four equally white doors you do mentally reach for a mop. But Hill-Gibbins’s plans for Figaro are surprisingly clean and surprisingly, well, dry. His modern-dress production has plenty of the provocateur’s quirky ticks, but it’s efficient and eminently revivable.

If that doesn’t get your pulse racing it’s because the whole thing feels so dutiful. This is Hill-Gibbins’s third opera but only his first encounter with the canon. His productions of both Thomas Adès’s Duchess of Argyll romp Powder Her Face and Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Greek riffed happily off the manic, maverick, up-yours spirit of the works, but here — faced with centuries of traditions and expectations — the director plays it safe.

‘It’s particularly difficult to develop a conceptual framework for the production to inhabit,’ the director laments in a programme interview. Damn that Mozart and the pesky completeness of his opera. It’s a revealing complaint. European-style ‘director’s theatre’ has shaken up a repertoire in serious danger of calcifying, has made us think and rethink, but it is also responsible for the pretentious parlour game Pin the Concept on the Opera. That’s not quite what we get here; Hill-Gibbins is too accomplished for that. But I’m not sure that the director’s neon brights and murky grotesques make much headway into the emotional corners of Mozart’s comedy.