‘Is that the one with the mobile phones?” someone asked me ahead of the latest revival of Jan Philipp Gloger’s 2016 production of Così fan Tutte. That’s the one, but those phones are just one cameo in a staging that rampages around time and place with riotous energy and accessories galore. Although Da Ponte’s libretto about male naivety and female faithlessness theoretically unfolds in a single 24-hour period, the Aristotelian unities don’t trouble us here.
Act One alone hurtles from a 21st-century night at the Royal Opera (still clutching their red programme books, the opera’s two couples have just watched … Mozart’s Così fan Tutte) to a farewell scene at a Brief Encounter-ish station, to a bar populated by a kind of Rat Pack of aggressively flirtatious men wearing thin black ties and porkpie hats, to a Technicolor Eden where the now-disguised Ferrando and Guglielmo pretend to poison themselves under an apple tree sporting a prominent serpent.
Gloger’s association-game isn’t for all tastes. Its self-conscious staginess becomes increasingly pronounced in the second half: the men have been back to the wardrobe department and now gambol in frock-coats and turbans in the 2D woodland of a stage-within-the-stage. Cue eye-rolls and sarcasm from their fiancees, who in this production have already seen through the fake moustaches but play along regardless. Despina and Alfonso, meanwhile, have more explicitly directorial positions than usual, stage-managing the movement of mid-century theatrical lighting and manoeuvring chorus members into place.
That a lot of detailed conceptualisation underpins the production is obvious from the programme’s interview between Gloger and his dramaturg, Katharina John. Seen live, some of that detail is impossible to grasp. What comes across instead is a kind of high-octane surrealism, as the characters veer in and out of different “realist” settings. The pace set by conductor Alexander Soddy was fast and furious, the orchestra’s tone quality and ensemble just occasionally suffering in such a turbo-charged performance.
With this revival cast, though, the production’s zany, sentimentality-free shtick works extremely well. Gerald Finley was born to play earnest, know-all Alfonso, his occasional snarls betraying a nastier streak. Jennifer France’s Despina is an onstage dynamo, revelling in silly voices for her absurd turns as a doctor and notary. As for the two “heroes”, Daniel Behle made a return appearance as a burnished if nerdy Ferrando, while Andrè Schuen’s Guglielmo was persuasively self-assured, physically at ease and vocally suave.
Best of all were Samantha Hankey and Golda Schultz in their house debuts. Hankey’s Dorabella was the ideal hard-edged sparring partner to Schultz’s sweet, agile Fiordiligi. Both provided moments of startling musical beauty – but Schultz’s virtuosic range of facial expressions did almost as much to humanise the opera’s troubling ambivalence.
