The Abduction from the Seraglio
Opera North
Un Ballo in Maschera
Royal Opera House
As I took my seat for Act II of Opera North’s new production of Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio, the woman sitting next to me — we hadn’t met — said, ‘Have you any idea what’s going on in this opera?’ and I said I hadn’t, at any rate in this production. Everyone agrees that Mozart’s dramatic sense deserted him quite extensively in Seraglio, but it was left to the director Tim Hopkins, who was also responsible for the designs, to remove whatever dramatic impetus the work has and to come up with something that is as hopelessly messy to follow as it is to look at. The sets, especially the first one, are a jumble of styles, cluttered, apparently designed for a play within a play, but that isn’t worked through, and awkward for the performers to negotiate at the same time as they try to relate to one another. Ineptitude of this order is unusual on the professional operatic stage; normally one has calculated more or less competent perversity.
Tim Hopkins and his colleague Nicholas Ridout decided to rewrite the piece extensively too, the first indication of that being the appearance before the curtain of a figure Mozart culpably omitted from his opera, the Mute, a spoken part, garrulous — a laugh there, of course — telling us what we don’t want to know and threading her way through the action alternately as a Western tour-guide and as an Eastern of indeterminate function. Hopkins wants us to be clearer than we would otherwise be that this is about Orientalism, and Edward Said’s eponymous, exploded book on the subject is quoted in the programme.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in