The wow factor

‘Nothing succeeds like excess,’ quipped Oscar Wilde, and Franco Zeffirelli’s production of Aida at La Scala, Milan in 2006 bears him out: for sheer jaw-dropping, applause- garnering theatrical bling, I have never seen anything like it and I doubt I ever will.

‘Nothing succeeds like excess,’ quipped Oscar Wilde, and Franco Zeffirelli’s production of Aida at La Scala, Milan in 2006 bears him out: for sheer jaw-dropping, applause- garnering theatrical bling, I have never seen anything like it and I doubt I ever will. People talk of empty spectacle, but this was full, full to the brim, exploding with colour, glittering with gilt, and jam-packed with near-naked extras. Astonishingly, it didn’t collapse into a ghastly mess: each tableau was organised and marshalled with military precision, and the stage was left clear for the principals when the story needed to proceed. It was the work of a master.

This grand luxe volume, the weight of which will cause most coffee tables to buckle, certainly matches Zeffirelli’s preferred style. It provides a sumptuously produced and illustrated chronicle of a career spanning 60 years of directing and designing opera, plays and films, accompanied by essays by various hands that are tactful bordering on hagiographic, and certainly not to be trusted as objective assessments of a career attended by as many brickbats as bouquets. The selection of photographs is erratic — the early theatre productions seem more imaginatively represented than the signature opera productions — but there’s no doubt that it amounts to a visual treasure trove.

The book doesn’t bother itself with any awkward questions. A master, yes, but master of precisely what? Is he merely a decorator with genius of a rather vulgar kind, or a true neo-realist in the tradition of his patron Luchino Visconti? ‘I have tried in my productions to offer a fully rounded image of mankind,’ Zeffirelli claims, but that sounds like piety to me.