Lucrezia Borgia has a bad reputation, and that holds whether you’re talking about the historical figure or Donizetti’s 1833 opera. The woman herself is fascinating: was she really the perpetrator of as many murders as she gets the blame for? As for the opera, when it first reached Paris, Victor Hugo – on whose play it was based – got an injunction to stop it being performed, so perhaps even he realised that its plot was something to blush about. Dramatically, it’s a convoluted story of concealed identity ending in a mass poisoning but with all but one of the deaths offstage; in between, there’s an elaborately set-up execution that’s easily foiled when, Bond-villain-style, the instigator simply leaves the room.
Eloise Lally’s straightforward production doesn’t lift this quite enough, dark and atmospheric though it is in Adam Wiltshire’s sets, with their flaming torches and stained-glass windows. As a touring show it’s necessarily lean, but the lack of a chorus, and therefore of any real sense of public versus private, sometimes confuses things. The party in the final act seems to be taking place in a men’s steam room.
