Concealed passion

ENO’s new production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin has created something of a stir by departing from the house almost-tradition of postmodernist, stunningly intrusive and invariably grotesquely irrelevant presentations that began in earnest sometime last year. The set designs for this opera, by Tom Pye, and the costumes, by Chloe Obolensky, update it to the late 19th century, but that is just a nervous tic. More surprisingly, Deborah Warner’s direction of the characters and actors is so unobtrusive that one wonders if she told anyone to do anything in particular. The most sensational departure from what we normally see is that Lensky wears glasses (not sunglasses) for the duel, gently stressing his bookish otherworldliness; and one other touch, to be mentioned later.

In many other operas, Warner’s present policy would be welcome, but one of the troubles with Onegin is that some of the characters, especially the eponymous anti-hero, are so sketchily portrayed both in their music and their words that to create a plausible and involving drama they need some direction. All the more so if the performer of the role of Onegin is as bland an actor as the young Norwegian Audun Iversen. It’s usual to say that Onegin is a cold cad, who is only awoken to feeling when he returns from his years of wandering and finds, to his chagrin, that Tatyana has made a satisfactory life for herself, or seems to have. Yet his rejection of her after she has written her impassioned letter to him is the most sensible thing anyone does in the whole opera, and I have yet to see a production of this highly popular work that makes that clear, and gives Onegin sympathetic treatment.