All Michieletto had to do was keep out of his way, allow the music to do what Wagner and Berlioz both knew it could, and this might have been the moment when Rossini’s last and greatest opera really fought for its place in the repertoire. Pappano has already established his credentials where this score is concerned, both in concert performances and his outstanding EMI recording. It’s partly the fault of the oversized metaphor that dominates the stage throughout - a tree uprooted (get it?) from the soil, over which all the principals must scramble with varying degrees of ease - but also of a fatal lack of communication between music and action.

To include all the opera’s ballet music but to deny it any dancers is misguided to supplement that lack with second-rate mime from the singers is just plain wilful.Īs a concept it’s not a terrible one, scraping the gloss off the myth, demanding we rewrite valorous tales of rebellion and oppression in the balder, blunter terms of today’s conflicts, but in an age of enormous human displacement and violence it generates startlingly little friction. There’s an emotional and dramatic void at the core of the show, partly born of Rossini’s ponderous score (which has moments of astonishing beauty and drama, unfortunately stitched together into a rather unwieldy whole), but mostly sucked hollow by a director who misunderstands his material. Let’s talk instead about how Michieletto’s production - lazy in concept, violently ugly in execution - doesn’t earn the extremity of that scene. No amount of euphemistic skirt-fumblings and decorous fadings-to-black (How naked is too naked?) can, or should, make it palatable. That some seem more concerned with the manner of its depiction - ‘gratuitous nudity’ is a phrase that has come up a lot - is even more worrying. That the debate, as it currently rages, centres on the acceptability of depicting rape on stage at all is worrying - a prudish self-censorship that places audience comfort above all, missing, or denying, the point of art. How Matt Hancock turned a failure into success

The royal opera house guillaume tell