The Elixir of Love, English National Opera, review: Dad’s Army crossed with Upstairs, Downstairs
The first sight that greets you in this new production of Donizetti’s evergreen comedy is a projected revolving globe, with the logo “ENO TV” emblazoned below. It’s bound to evoke memories of the old BBC TV logo in not-so-young audience members, and it sets the tone for a production updated from 19th-century Italy to Second World War-era England.
The country girl Adina, who’s determined to flirt her way through life, is now the Lady Bountiful of a country house, packed with older horny-handed sons of toil and young “land girls” on the look-out for some love interest. In amongst them is the naïve Nemorino, who is despairing at Adina’s rejection, and mortified by the mockery of the local RAF officer Belcore, who swaggers his way into Adina’s flighty affections. Naturally, Nemorino is delighted when the quack doctor Dulcamara turns up and sells him a magic love elixir.
It’s a nice conceit which would have worked perfectly well on its own as an updating. Unfortunately, director Harry Fehr layers another conceit on top: the idea that we’re looking at an episode in a sitcom, as if a rural Dad’s Army had been crossed with Upstairs, Downstairs and laced with meltingly lovely tunes. Presumably, that’s why the land-girl’s boots are so weirdly spotless, as are the RAF uniforms. Perhaps it also explains why the comedy is annoyingly laid on with a trowel, with everyone gurning their anxiety, flirtiness, annoyance, etc, in a way that’s too unsubtle to be funny.
It’s a shame, because there’s much to enjoy in the production. Young New Zealand tenor Thomas Atkins as Nemorino had a gangly, floppy-haired romantic poet charm, and if his light tenor was (I suspect) mostly too light to reach the back of the theatre, he found a surprisingly big tone at moments of despair and passion. Rhian Lois as Adina was also essentially small-voiced, but had an engaging flamboyant pertness. Brandon Cedel as Dulcamara was the image of the leering, anxious war-time spiv in his shiny double-breasted suit, and Dan D’Souza as the squadron-leader Belcore was a perfect cardboard cut-out of a preening military man.
As for what opera houses now call “the creatives”, set designer Nicky Shaw’s pleasing evocation of a stately home’s Downstairs was shrewdly detailed. We could see money was tight, and that Lady Adina had a serious damp problem. Amanda Holden’s translation, tweaked to include references to “flying” and “airmen”, had a nice sitcom-ish humour. “Will you drop all your defences?” leered Belcore to Adina at one point, to much tittering.
The chorus were on excellent form, evoking the dim-witted gossiping of country folk who, at the end, actually fight over Dulcamara’s remaining bottles of the elixir. Conductor Teresa Riveiro Böhm paced the opera beautifully, allowing the pregnant pauses to expand in a way that to some degree made up for the lack of pathos on stage.
What pathos? you might reasonably ask, given that this is a frothy comedy. But that’s the peculiar magic of this opera. Nemorino’s touching aria “A furtive tear” – the opera’s hit number – should feel like a final breaking to the surface of feelings that we’ve sensed earlier. Here it came as a surprise. The farcical exaggeration of this production certainly makes for a good show, but the vein of poetry in Donizetti’s masterpiece is rarely glimpsed.
ENO’s production of The Elixir of Love continues until 5 December; tickets: eno.org