Rupert Goold is the man every company wants to direct for them these days. Two of the biggest stage hits of the moment, Oliver! and Enron, are both his. Now he has turned his attention to opera – not for the first time, since Garsingon’s Le Comte Ory of 2005 was one of his successes, but for the first time in London.
His astonishing new production of Puccini’s final opera Turandot for English National Opera at the London Coliseum shifts the action from “Peking, in legendary times” to an ultra-swish Chinese restaurant called the Imperial Palace in very modern times. Its peculiarities are such as to suggest it is probably in America. Dress code appears to be “pop icons”, which is why we have no fewer than three Elvis lookalikes among the weirdly garbed clientele. And as for the grub . . . well, a glimpse of the kitchen, with its dangling human corpses, tells you all you need to know.
The nightmare world conjured by Goold and set designer Miriam Buether is similar in style to the Grand Guignol of Richard Jones’s celebrated production of Hansel and Gretel for WNO, with its bloody knives and meat cleavers, and, likewise, is well suited to the unpleasant excesses of the opera itself.
The central character, the bloodthirsty Princess Turandot (the German soprano Kirsten Blanck), whose impossible three riddles have led so many prospective husbands to their deaths, is an enemy of happy matrimony rivalled in opera only by Bluebeard. (He’s on his way next month, incidentally, at the Coliseum.) She appears first through the swing doors of the kitchen in the form of a huge mist-swathed ice sculpture (shades of Narnia’s White Witch), and frankly never unfreezes from then on.
One remains mystified about the passion she stirs in the hero Calaf (Gwyn Hughes Jones, who supplies a superb Nessun Dorma), especially after the stern warning he is given by her Grand Chancellor Ping (Benedict Nelson) and his fellow henchman Pang and Pong (both of whom were sung by substitutes on the opening night). Partly, there is the thrill of danger, presumably, and perhaps submission to a raw power he is certainly not going to find in the young slave, Liu (superb Amanda Echalaz), for all her . . . yes, slavish devotion to him.
The vast forces Goold has marshalled on the stage are matched in the pit by the orchestra. Conducting Puccini’s score for the first time, ENO music director Edward Gardner can certainly not be accused of caution in his approach, with thumping fortissimo that sent my hands to my ears more than once.
Until December 9. 0871 911 0200 (www.eno.org).
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