Idomeneo
ENO, in rep until 9 July
Lohengrin
City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra
Mozart’s Idomeneo remains, despite the best efforts of its proselytisers, a connoisseur’s piece. For all its beauties and its emotional power, it is a predominantly static work, and one in which one can’t really care all that much about what happens to the central sympathetic characters — think of the Da Ponte operas and of Die Zauberflöte, by contrast, and the point is made. Katie Mitchell, who directs the new production at ENO, ‘places Idomeneo’s timeless dilemma in a contemporary context’, according to the programme. She would. One wonders, first, if Idomeneo’s dilemma is timeless. How many people today promise Poseidon to sacrifice the first human they see if he grants them a safe sea passage? And if it’s a matter of taking Poseidon, rash vows to the gods, and so forth, as metaphors, what are they metaphors for?
Anyway, of course what happens when the curtain rises is that the characters sit on a contemporary sofa, or dine at an immense table, while suited executives and other undesirables, and waiters, shoot into and out of doors at a rate suggesting Feydeau, and to no purpose, except to deliver drinks to the evidently alcoholic principals; Electra is particularly thirsty, and when Room Service appears in Act II she behaves in a way closely modelled on the Duchess of York or possibly of Argyll.
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