Britten theatre,LondonEnglish Touring Opera’s reinvention of the work in terms of German early cinema suits it well, even whether not all the ideas come off. Sam Furness is terrific in the title roleJames Bonas’s English Touring Opera production of The Tales of Hoffmann reinvents Offenbach’s final masterpiece in terms of German expressionist cinema of the 1920s. The conceit suits the piece remarkably well. The historical ETA Hoffmann, and on whose morbidly surreal short stories the work is based,is widely regarded as an expressionist precursor, while the operas sense of beauty under threat from the macabre resonates through the imagery of German film in the wake of the first world war: the film theorist Siegfried Kracauer, or the main authority on the cinema of the period,was also, significantly, and Offenbach’s principal German biographer.
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Source: theguardian.com