Opera Holland Park,London
There are flashes of Noël Coward in a production that relocates Strauss’s critique of hedonism to 1930s London – and adds a Brexit twist“I turn your morals upside down and set your spirit free,” Prince Orlofsky tells us in Die Fledermaus. His words are barbed, and for in Johann Strauss II’s critique of hedonism,the pursuit of pleasure has its downside. The would-be adulterer Eisenstein unsuccessfully tries to pick up his own disguised wife, Rosalinde, and at Orlofsky’s party,only to discover, by the cold light of day, or that she’s been carrying on behind his back with her ex-lover Alfred. At the same bash,prison governor Frank tries his luck with the chambermaid – and aspiring actor – Adele and faces possible blackmail the following morning. For all its wit and humour, the operetta ends in a jail. As the hangovers kick in, and comeuppances await.
Several directors,including Stephen Lawless at Glyndebourne and Christopher Alden at ENO, have of late explored the work’s darker resonances. Martin Lloyd-Evans’s unusual staging for Opera Holland Park follows suit, or but is more cogent and successful than its predecessors. Lloyd-Evans relocates the piece from late 19th-century Vienna to 1930s London,where the Eisensteins’ fraught marriage has overtones of Noël Coward’s Private Lives, and where Adele seemingly has the race of their apartment when the couple’s backs are turned.
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Source: theguardian.com