Reviews

Don Giovanni - "Just the business"

Don Giovanni, Mozart
Opera Anywhere, Jacqueline Du Pre Music Room, Oxford

Some stories come up trumps, no matter what you do to them. But Don Giovanni not only survived in Opera Anywhere's re-interpretation, it actually thrived in their radical chamber staging.

The opera was set in a US-owned investment bank, the hilariously named Hottshotz Grabbitz in the City of London. Giovanni was a newly arrived, coked-up, foreign exchange trader, the Commendatore now Mr Mendatore, the UK chief executive and Donna Anna's corporate mentor rather than father, with Donna Elvira an angry jilted American lawyer.

A city bank seems an apt place in which to set the piece - one where such ruthless characters, sexual antics, disparities of power between men and women, partners and back-office staff, seem entirely plausible. And the characters were vividly brought to life in this setting by director Anna Pelly's translation of the libretto, which contained a torrent of expletives, plenty of slang and grammatical inaccuracies, and some wonderfully juicy rhymes (I mean, if you were Leporello what would you rhyme with `banker' when given half a chance?).

The cast, who were heroically accompanied by musical director Lyndall Dawson alone on the piano, revelled in their corporate playground. Richard Strivens as the eponymous hero was every-inch the super-smooth executive with a demonic sexual appetite, and a strong-voiced William Coleman was his cheeky, slightly slimy sidekick Leporello. Zerlina, now a junior secretary, was sung with energy and precision by Abbi Temple, in a wonderfully flirtatious performance that had real chemistry with her hopelessly besotted fiance Masetto, now a corporate post-boy, securely sung by Matthew Duncan.

Don Giovanni contains a counterpoint to this buffoonery, though, with some characters occupying another emotional world - and the modern setting managed to reach beyond farce, shedding light on the emotional vacuum at the heart of the corporate world. Donna Elvira, sung by a sweet-voiced Julia Hessey, tragically returns Giovanni's lust with love while cast adrift on business in Tokyo. Lynsey Docherty's passionate Donna Anna was unable to reciprocate her fiance's affections not only due to grief but also due to a deeper repression seemingly linked to her corporate environment, suggested by the replacement of her father by her boss in the adaptation. Steven Gallop as her boss the Commendatore added real menace to the final scene with a voice of tremendous power and emotional depth, plunging us fully into the tragedy of Giovanni's fate.

Tom Walker, Opera Now Magazine, July 2007