All’s well that ends well

The last ten minutes of any Don Giovanni tell you more about a director than the previous two hours. Mozart’s elastic ‘dramma giocoso’ can take a lot of pulling about, can be stretched taut into tragedy or squeezed into the tight confines of a farce, but whatever option (or combination of options) you choose, those final moments are the test of success — the point at which the dramatic threads either sag, snap or hold firm. Oliver Mears’s production — first seen at the Bergen National Opera and now at NI Opera in Belfast — lets them fall limp. Seemingly unsure which choice to make, he makes no choice at all, leaving us with an ending that isn’t so much elusive as it is evasive.

This is a Giovanni played for laughs, a frothy operatic sitcom set on the cruise ship The Seville in the early 1960s. Women frolic in candy-coloured chiffon negligees and men preen in polo necks and velvet jackets as they all flirt with sexual liberation and one another.