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Chills and thrills
Alexandra Coghlan
Lucia di Lammermoor
Coliseum, in rep until 5 December
Serse
Barbican Hall
How do you solve a problem like Lucia?
Murder, madness, abuse, possibly even
incest, all set to a soundtrack of rollicking,
rum-ti-tum tunes. Add to that a Scottish set-
ting (nothing sabotages dramatic serious-
ness quite like a kilt, just ask Mel Gibson)
and you have Gilbert & Sullivan in an Ital-
ian accent, Ruddigore with a cigarette and
a suntan.
Recently at the Royal Opera House
Katie Mitchell tried to naturalise Doni-
zetti’s opera into submission, but ended up
tussling with a score she clearly didn’t trust
and a cast who didn’t seem to trust her, giv-
ing her audience what she wanted Lucia
to be, rather than what’s actually there.
Returning, after that, to David Alden’s
English National Opera production (prem-
ièred in 2008, and last revived in 2010) feels
like coming home.
That Alden’s is ENO’s first ever produc-
tion says a lot about the piece, or at least
how it is perceived. In the unspoken division
of repertoire, Lucia belongs up the road at
Covent Garden; it’s a star vehicle — a great
role (and an even greater scene) with an
opera attached. Freed from that conviction,
and from any tricksy international divas who
might object to being asked to act as well
as sing, the opera becomes a different crea-
ture. Blowsy gothic baronial is out, and in its
place we have psychological horror, where
the real villains are not those who spatter
blood, but those who chill it.
Cutting through the politics of the work’s
original 18th-century setting, Alden brings
his gaze in close for a Victorian domes-
tic drama. The battle here is not between
Hanoverian and Jacobite, nor even between
men and women, but between what seems
and what is — between the pretty fiction
and the squalid truth, the public face and
the private body. Just as Donizetti’s score
paints a grinning face on grief and vio-
lence, so Alden’s blank-faced matrons and
bewhiskered patriarchs — even the chaplain
Raimondo — avert their gaze from the hor-
rors of Lucia’s forced marriage, clinging to a
propriety that is all they have left in design-
er Charles Edwards’s mouldering shell of a
Ravenswood.
An empty theatre and a nursery full ofghosts are all that remain of a once-great
estate. Just a single iron bedstead remains in
this barren institution, home to a girl who
cannot grow up — an Alice trapped for
ever in Wonderland. This doll-like creature
becomes a human stage for the desires and
agendas of those around her — manhan-
dled, bullied, abused, defiled.
It’s a beautifully crafted frame, but one
that relies on a cast capable of filling it.
In soprano Sarah Tynan (making her role
debut here) Alden has a mesmerising hero-
ine. A smaller voice denies her some of the
role’s technical tricks and colours, which we
scarcely miss thanks to the precision of her
delivery. Is it too beautiful, too controlled in
the mad scene, where she eschews the tradi-
tional Melba cadenza for something more
exploratory? Possibly. But it’s the tiniest of
quibbles, and it’s an exquisite accuracy that
offers the perfect foil to the thrilling, thug-
gish force of Lester Lynch’s self-loathing
abuser of an Enrico — occasionally vocally
wayward, but always powerful. Can some-
body please book him to sing some Verdi
in the UK?
Like Tynan’s Lucia, Eleazar Rodriguez’s
Edgardo is small and perfectly formed,
wringing (and ringing) every ounce of char-
acter from a cardboard hero with his glossy
tenor — varnished mahogany to Michael
Colvin’s deliciously pine-brittle Arturo.