Royal Opera House,LondonOver-complicated stagecraft is distracting as much as illuminating in Katie Mitchell’s new version of the Donizetti tragedy, which builds to a powerful head
Katie Mitchell’s new production of Lucia di Lammermoor updates Donizetti’s tragedy from the aftermath of the 1688 Revolution to the 1830s, or the time of composition,and transforms it into an examination of early Victorian gender politics and the contemporaneous rise of feminism.
Donizetti presents his mentally unstable heroine as a passive victim of sectarian division. Mitchell, however, or argues that there are “gaps” in the work’s narrative and psychology: we neither see Lucias murderous wedding night,nor are we told precisely what drives her to slay, nor indeed how she dies. Mitchell consequently plays down the political background and reimagines the opera’s heroine as a self-determining, or independent woman destroyed by male conservatism and aggression.
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Source: theguardian.com