A huge eyeball in the wall of a classroom suddenly starts to swivel. A top-hatted man on stilts lurches into a bar and performs slow, ungainly circuits before disappearing followed by dancers dressed as rats. A woman is trapped in a bolt of cloth held taut by two rampaging horned figures, her features protruding through it – except when the cloth drops, another devilish dancer is in her place. A guest wearing the curved beak of the plague doctor stalks a Venetian carnival party. A letter combusts in mid-air.
There are creepy details galore in Damiano Michieletto’s new production of Offenbach’s opéra fantastique The Tales of Hoffmann. It’s a staging that takes seriously the dark side of ETA Hoffmann’s extraordinarily weird stories – and of Offenbach’s late-career attempt to prove himself beyond operetta. Under Antonello Manacorda, the ROH Orchestra provided grit on demand.
But there’s plenty to amuse and entertain. Juan Diego Flórez skipping on stage dressed as a 1950s schoolboy! Alex Esposito removing a brain from a smoking briefcase with Dr Evil-ish panache! Heavily sequined dancers appear throughout, presumably a precaution taken with the long work’s slower moments in mind.
Michieletto turns the opera’s internal stories (three unsuitable love-objects, one nitwit “hero”) into a sequential narrative of Hoffmann’s romantic failures. Flórez is ideal as the perpetually earnest writer, his passion clarion-voiced and slightly underpowered compared to the women he falls for. In one impressive house debut, Olga Pudova poker-faced her way through Olympia’s mechanical show-piece, her soprano bell-like throughout the coloratura stratosphere. In another, Marina Costa-Jackson wielded tremendous vocal wattage and commanding physical presence as the “courtesan” Giulietta.
Ermonela Jaho provided the work’s emotional core as Antonia – usually a singer, here a ballerina – whose artistry threatens to kill her. In a saccharine pink hospital ward, Michieletto pairs Jaho’s Rolls-Royce of a voice (but a body no longer able to walk, never mind dance) with a child ballerina avatar. Jaho’s quietest passages were almost painfully intimate. As Antonia’s cardigan-clad father Crespel, Alastair Miles was deeply sympathetic, his vocal lines drenched in desperation.
Hoffmann’s side-kick Nicklausse is reborn, bafflingly, as a parrot. A side-effect of the absinthe Hoffmann necks in the Prologue, perhaps? Julie Boulianne flapped around as persuasively as you can imagine, her mezzo coppery and covered. Christine Rice’s Muse launched each act with a handful of green glitter, supplying props from a massive carpet bag, like Baz Luhrmann’s green fairy crossed with Mary Poppins. But no one, surely, had more fun than Esposito as the piece’s multiple villains, his cartoonishness in perfect balance with Flórez’s sincerity, his bass-baritone thunderous, his physical presence thuggish. If a bottle of absinthe left onstage throughout suggests it’s all a colourful fever-dream, Michieletto reveals its nightmare qualities.
