Maybe not all those who came to boo stayed on to cheer. But after all the media hysteria about the excesses of English National Opera's new production of A Masked Ball, the reality of the opening performance last night was rather more serious and far less sensationalist than some more excitable souls had led us to believe.
Yes, the curtain does go up on Calixto Bieito's production to reveal a row of conspirators sitting on lavatories (there are 14 of them, and not one remembers to pull the chain); yes, to begin the second act there is the gang rape and murder of a rent boy, and one of the main conspirators spends much of the first act in drag, and a very convincing woman he makes. But each of those visuals, and of the myriad others in this superbly realised and immensely thoughtful production, is logically fitted into the whole scheme of the drama. One knows at every moment how the staging got there, and why its images are as they appear.
Bieito and his set designer Alfons Flores (costumes by Merce Paloma) have transplanted this story of intrigue and adultery from the Sweden of the original to Spain in the late 1970s, when the country was attempting the delicate transition from Franco's dictatorship to the modern democracy of today. There's no one-to-one correspondence between the opera's Gustavus III and the youthful Juan Carlos, or between any other character and modern Spanish equivalents; it is the unstable worlds of the two kingdoms that generate the dramatic resonance, and through which Bieito brilliantly defines the strange, tragicomic atmosphere of Verdi's masterpiece, in which black comedy constantly confronts searing, unmitigated tragedy.
In this transposition Anckarstroem (solidly played by David Kempster) is a military man, and the fortune-teller Madame Arvidson (the seductive Rebecca de Pokint Davies) is a brothel keeper for whom reading palms is just a sideline, and who dabbles in a bit of satanism as well. Gustavus and his henchmen clearly enjoy disguising themselves for their visit to see her (hence the drag); the third-act conspiracy takes place in Anckarstroem's chrome bathroom, which allows everyone plenty of scope for humiliating Oscar, here played by Mary Plazas as a coquettish secretary. It is all very precisely imagined; anyone from the generations framed cinematically by Straw Dogs and Reservoir Dogs will find the stagecraft and the imagery totally convincing.
Not every voice on display is an authentic Verdian one, but no one lets the side down, and John Daszak's performance as Gustavus is untiring and utterly committed.
· In rep until April 11. Box office: 020-7632 8300.
