This year’s Grange festival opens with a new production of Mozart’s Così Fan Tutte, conducted by Kirill Karabits and directed by Martin Lloyd-Evans. It’s a striking piece of theatre, at once traditional and probing: traditional because Lloyd-Evans and his designer Dick Bird keep the original 18th-century Neapolitan setting; probing because Lloyd-Evans carefully and insightfully prises open the opera’s emotional complexities, gradually exposing the moral and sexual hypocrisies at its centre.
The production’s stance is established during the overture, when we see Guglielmo (Nicholas Lester) buy a locket for Fiordiligi (Samantha Clarke) from a vendor in a teeming Neapolitan street, then creep back to visit a brothel, from which he eventually emerges with Alessandro Fisher’s Ferrando and Christian Senn’s Alfonso, the three of them slightly the worse for wear. It soon becomes glaringly apparent that, in testing Fiordiligi’s fidelity, Guglielmo also intends to spend the winnings from his wager on prostitutes.
