The opera director David Alden has never been one to tread the straight and narrow. Something kinky would emerge, I’m sure, even if he directed the Queen’s televised Christmas message. So matching him up at English National Opera with the madness, obsessions and phantasmagoria of Tchaikovsky’s whirring and troubling The Queen of Spades was simply asking for trouble. The Alden fingerprints quickly emerge. We’re in several periods at the same time: Pushkin’s Imperial Russia, yes, but also Stalin’s ossified Soviet Union, plus splashes of the frivolous 1920s and 60s and a snatch of the 18th century. Fashions and hemlines keep darting around: Red Army uniforms, thigh-crawling cocktail numbers, hookers’ sleaze, and, for Felicity Palmer’s Countess, what might be Miss Havisham’s nightdress. There is cross-dressing, of course, an unnecessary gang rape, a far from innocent intermezzo pastorale, and a loopy irruption of animal heads, lifted, it seems, from a ‘furry fandom’ subculture of which I was blissfully ignorant before.
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