REVIEW: Scottish Opera's Don Giovanni

Don Giovanni

Scottish Opera

Empire Theatre

Eden Court

COMING after last year’s bright and breezy Magic Flute from the same creative team, Don Giovanni is a darker dip into the world of Mozart.

Where the Magic Flute offered Enlightenment through knowledge, Don Giovanni has seduction, infidelity, rape and murder on the way to damnation for our anti-hero.

Don Giovanni, played by a suitably suave Jacques Imbrailo, lives by the creed "being faithful to one (woman) would mean being cruel to all the rest" and keeps an extensive dossier on his conquests — rich or poor, beautiful or ugly, young or old.

Where once this might have once conjured up the image of a dashing rake, in our post Jimmy Savile world Don Giovanni’s sexual obsessions now carry a more predatory ring.

Designer Simon Higlett adds to that downbeat tone with his set, a dark, slightly sinister Venice — the feel is more the city of Don’t Look Now than the glamorous backdrop of The Tourist or Wings of The Dove — while mysterious masked figures make eerie appearances in the gloom,

Giovanni’s one real relationship is with his servant Leporello, played by a scene stealing Peter Kalman.

Made complicit by his master in the opening scene’s murder, with both men holding the dagger that plunges into the hapless Commendatore (Jóhann Smári Sævarsson), Leporello seems to both long for escape, but remain eternally bound to Giovanni, putting a measure of depth into his clownish figure’s characterisation.

As the decently up-right Don Ottavio, Ed Lyon has a couple of rousing arias, but his straight-laced character never really seems much of a threat to the immoral Don Giovanni.

Unlike the virile poor sailor Masetto (Barnaby Rea), who adds a touch of class war to his personal mission of vengeance against the Don as he leads what amounts to a lynch mob through the narrow Venetian streets. Lucky for Giovanni he isn’t the sharpest tool in the box.

However, he and his bride, the not as innocent as she appears Zerlina (Anna Devin), do provide one of the sexiest moments of the evening with a duet which hints at 50 Shades of Gray territory.

Lisa Milne brings some dignity to the betrayed and deluded Donna Elvira and conductor Speranza Scappucci on her Scottish Opera debut ensures Mozart’s score is rich and sprightly, though this is not a production that will have you leaving the theatre with a spring in your step as the more optimistic Magic Flute may have done.

CM

Scottish Opera's Don Giovanni continues at Eden Court on Saturday 9th November.