Directors have taken Don Giovanni to extremes of late, most notably Graham Vick at Glyndebourne and Calixto Bieito at English National Opera, both of whom found themselves faced with charges of gratuitous excess.
By contrast, Deborah Paige's new production for English Touring Opera errs, if anything, on the side of decorum. Where Vick had the Don wallowing in a shit heap and Bieito turned him into a coke-snorting yob, Paige makes him a society charmer who plots his seductions while smilingly dispensing black forest gateau to his victims from a hostess trolley.
The opera has been updated to the late 1950s - after the postwar economic boom, but before the onset of sexual liberalism. The transposition occasionally skews Mozart's stance. Paige replaces the opera's emphasis on class with an emphasis on money.
The Don doles out cash to Leporello from a bulging wallet and turns heads by virtue of the fact that he is the most expensively dressed guy on the block. Elvira, meanwhile, kitted out in New Look frocks, observes the proletarian scruffiness of Zerlina and Masetto with thinly disguised contempt.
Paige is often shrewd in her observations. The corrosive guilt that destroys the relationship between Anna and Ottavio is persuasively treated. The production's moments of perviness are all the more shocking in the discreet context of the whole. Leporello has his master's list of conquests tattooed across his body, and flashes his pecs and arse at Elvira with vicarious sexual delight.
Where Paige slips, however, is in her handling of the opera's metaphysics. The Don - Hakan Vramsmo, a handsome Brad Pitt lookalike - is naive rather than spiritually defiant; he is amazed that damnation is the consequence of crimes of which he remains morally unaware. His all-important sense of existential daring, of maintaining his integrity even in the face of God, is conspicuous by its absence.
The production is decently sung, though the men fare better than the women. In addition to Vramsmo, there is a slimy Leporello from Nicholas Todorovic and a fluent Ottavio from Darren Abrahams.
Catherine Hegarty (suffering from a cold) is the traumatised, if strident Anna, while Pamela Wilcock makes an unusually uptight Elvira, more neurotic and less sympathetic than most. The conductor, James Morgan, drives it hard, making it a genuine conversation piece for once, rather than a disconnected sequence of recitatives, arias and ensembles.
· Ends tomorrow. Box office: 01223 503333. Then tours to Southsea, Tunbridge Wells, Poole, and across Britain until June 8.
