Too affectionate, not enough cruelty: Don Pasquale, at the Royal Opera House, reviewed

There are many things to enjoy in the Royal Opera’s revival of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, but perhaps the most surprising is that the director plays it straight. This was my first encounter with Damiano Michieletto’s newish (2019) staging, and the plan was to approach it without preconceptions. (If we’re about to experience, say, a Bold Feminist Re-Imagining, I’d prefer to deduce it from the evidence on stage.) But for an opera premièred in 1843, Don Pasquale is distinctly old-school, with all its commedia dell’arte assumptions intact and whirring away like clockwork. The elderly miser Don Pasquale disinherits his lovelorn nephew and marries a compliant young bride who instantly becomes an abusive shopaholic scold. Naturally, it’s all a ruse, designed by the statutory wily servant (here, a doctor) to unite the young lovers and teach the old fool to act his age. Surely no culturally-savvy director is going to let us find that funny in 2022?

Actually, Michieletto does. True, it’s updated, but the plot requires Don Pasquale to dress in outdated fashions and unless you really know your knee breeches from your pantaloons, how better to show that than with a pink tie and a check blazer? Paolo Fantin’s set removes the walls but not the doors from Don Pasquale’s bungalow, so we can observe the to-ings and fro-ings of his silent, Mrs Overall-like maid. We see the cosy squalor of his bachelor lifestyle, and cringe with him when his new wife bins the lot in favour of monochrome minimalism (out goes the vintage Fiat; in comes a phallic Maserati). His fake bride Norina, meanwhile, works as a lowly dresser in a fashion studio: cue a lot of fun with greenscreen projections, meshing neatly with a plot that’s driven by costume and illusion.