Good humour, bad taste

L’Elisir d’amore; Das Wunder del Heliane

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Gavin Mortimer

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After not seeing Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’amore for years, I went to two new productions of it in five days. The Glyndebourne one, which I reported on last week, is admirable, but the Royal Opera production is in some ways better still. That surprised me, because the director is Laurent Pelly, who also designs the costumes, with Donate Marchand, and the sets are by Chantal Thomas. That was the team responsible for La fille du régiment, the enormous success at the beginning of the year which I found so irritating, though almost everyone else left holding their ribs from an evening of unmitigated hilarity. In that production everything was in quotation marks, with a goofy chorus and incessant parody of all the elements of Italian 19th-century comic opera.