Joe Hill-Gibbin’s production premiered at the London Coliseum in March 2020, only to close immediately because off Covid. Five years later it is back.
Mozart’s music, a sublime mixture of wit and melancholy, humanises the farce. The singing is fine. The production is not. Set in modern times and played out in a huge white box, it is difficult to tell who are the aristocrats and who are the servants. Physically, Almaviva looks like Figaro and Figaro looks like Almaviva.
Inside the box is a long corridor and a wall with four doors. There is no furniture and no props. The cast stand in single lines, often artificially close to each other, and sing directly to the audience.
Hill-Gibbins feels the opera does not need any ornamentation or decoration and prefers an empty space. “I wanted,” he said, “to make a production that was fun but also highlighted the opera’s dramatic intensity and emotional depth, including the cruelty and violence.”
I have seen funnier productions. I remained emotionally uninvolved throughout.
Coddy Quattlebaum has a big personality and he, as Figaro, and Nardus Williams as the Countess stand out in a cast, which includes David Ireland as Almaviva, Mary Bevan as Susanna and Hanna Hipp as that irritating pageboy, Cherubino. I much enjoyed Mozart’s sextet at the end of Act 3.
It would be great to see The Marriage of Figaro, the actual play Beaumarchais wrote and which King Louis XVI banned in 1778, finding the attacks on the social order and the mockery of authority and privilege detestable, and thinking a production would be dangerous folly.
Three years later his wife, Marie Antoinette, persuaded him to allow a private performance. The play enjoyed an unprecedented success, its fame sweeping Europe. Mozart jumped on the bandwagon and his opera premiered in Vienna in 1786.
Baumarchais’s comedy is the best French farce outside of Feydeau and a revival is long overdue.
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