Clear, complex and gripping: Opera North’s Rigoletto reviewed

Say what you like about that Duke of Mantua, but he’s basically an OK sort of bloke. A bit of an arse, sure; the kind of TOWIE-adjacent, skinny jean-wearing reality star who’d commission photographic portraits of himself and recruit an entourage of hipsters and B-boy wannabes. But really, his worst crimes are against taste. His neon-lit crib might be hung with hideous religious art, but his parties are relatively free of the nudity, quaffing and non-consensual dry-humping that tends to characterise Act One of Verdi’s Rigoletto. In Femi Elufowoju Jr’s new staging for Opera North, the Duke lays on a hog roast for his posse but doesn’t forget to order pizza for his security staff. The Deliveroo courier got a big laugh as they pedalled in across the stage.

So yes, this is an updated Rigoletto (it’s rare to see anything else), and Rae Smith’s designs veer between squalid urban decay and the DayGlo bling of low-rent celebrity culture. But Elufowoju doesn’t leave it there. What if the Duke’s misbehaviour (if not that of his thuggish hangers-on) is merely emotional carelessness, born of affluence? (Gilda is still smitten by him, even at the end.) And what if Rigoletto is successful, privileged and actually sexier than the Duke? Eric Greene, in the title role, is seen being kitted out in a glittering tux before entering the Duke’s party like a star in his own right. His jests punch downwards, and his barely suppressed rage is the result of something broken within. Suddenly you’ve got a character with something like the Shakespearean complexity that Verdi perceived in Rigoletto’s source, Victor Hugo’s Le roi s’amuse.

Not everything in the concept joins up. This isn’t entirely believable as a world in which a character such as the Duke could have rivals executed, even if the (armed) police are in his pocket.