Tim Albery’s 2010 production of Wagner’s Tannhäuser is now back at Covent Garden for its second revival, and remains a flawed piece of theatre that only fitfully illuminates the opera’s complexities. Wagner examines the conflict between sexuality and spirituality in the soul of an artist, presenting them as being at once polarised and mutually dependent by deploying contrasting developments of the same thematic material for each. Albery, however, muddles matters by adding too many glosses about the relationship between art and reality and the role of the artist in times of political turmoil.
His Venusberg is a place of illusion, escape and irresponsibility, purposefully if unconvincingly modelled on the Opera House itself, where the curtains part to reveal Ekaterina Gubanova’s cabaret diva Venus presiding over a tawdry table dancing show. Taking his cue, meanwhile, from the Landgrave’s remark about artistic renewal after military conflict, Albery has the song competition take place in a bombed-out war zone inhabited by armed thugs, where the remains of the Venusberg are visible amid the rubble. There’s little sense of a society governed by religious values and consequently no real indication as to why Tannhäuser’s behaviour provokes such outrage. As a dramatic totality, I’m afraid, it doesn’t satisfactorily cohere.
