Fails to ignite: Royal Opera's Tales of Hoffmann reviewed

I couldn’t love anyone who didn’t love Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann. Everything – everything – is stacked against this opera. Offenbach left the score unfinished when he died, tormented with gout and pilloried by bores, at the age of 61. Some of its best-loved numbers were upcycled from his earlier hits, and at least one isn’t by him at all. Yet somehow, it lives. More than that, it soars: a tale of disillusion that glows with wonder and hope; a hymn to the sweetness of life and the miracle of art, held together against all logic by the sheer charisma of a composer who shot for the moon and fell among the stars. ‘Opéra fantastique’ was Offenbach’s own description, and he’s not wrong.

I’m not saying that Michieletto doesn’t care about this opera. I just don’t think that he really gets it

So, does Damiano Michieletto – the director of the Royal Opera’s new production – love The Tales of Hoffmann? On balance, I’d say so. Does he love it with the kind of irrational, wide-eyed, delirious passion that it deserves and demands? In his own way – superficially chilly and slightly too knowing, like so many modern directors – perhaps he does. Sort of. For some of the time.

Certainly, he doesn’t stint on fantasy. There are glitter-clad demons, masked beauties and dancing animals, all very Hoffmann-esque. A monstrous eyeball swivels above the stage during the tale of Olympia (Olga Pudova). Child ballerinas pirouette in tutus and ghostly cellos descend from the skies as poor Antonia (Ermonela Jaho) prepares to sing herself to death. Hoffmann’s Muse (Christine Rice) is preceded by a bevy of green-clad dancers. These hallucinations are fuelled by something stronger than beer and melancholy, and we see Hoffmann (who ages from schoolboy to grey-haired wreck over the course of the action) slumped over his absinthe in a sparsely furnished bar.