The Spanish director Calixto Bieito, who outraged some critics at last year's Edinburgh festival with his production of Barbaric Comedies, first came to prominence in the UK with a staging of Calderon's Life Is a Dream. His English National Opera version of Don Giovanni in effect asserts the opposite - that life is a tawdry, repellent hallucination riddled with existential futility.
Mozart's drama about mankind's rejection of God in a quest for the outer limits of human experience has been relocated in a nihilistic urban present. We witness a group of yobs on an evening's rampage in an arc-lit city, supposedly Barcelona, though it could be London, Berlin or LA. They snort coke, get drunk, urinate against lampposts and have sex in cars. As the night wears on, they get increasingly violent, their escapades culminating in an orgy of blood lust.
None of this has anything to do with Mozart. In fact, the production's basic premise permits Bieito to duck every issue the opera raises. If the characters are drugged up to their eyeballs throughout, language is reduced to narcotic-induced babbling. Therefore, motivation becomes pointless, psychology is rendered redundant, and stage action can be divorced from text and score.
What we're left with is a stream of imagery accompanied by Mozart, rather than an attempt at an interpretation of Mozart. Bieito's approach also allows him to junk the work's metaphysics and rewrite its narrative. Don Giovanni does not murder the Commendatore in the opening scene, but wounds him, allowing him to turn up later with Reservoir Dogs-style blood slick. Far from dragging Giovanni to damnation, the Commendatore is finally despatched with a carving knife. Giovanni's demise comes later: in the final sextet, he's tied up and stabbed by the rest of the cast.
All this is done with a vertiginous physicality on the part of the cast, though the effect on the score is detrimental. Bieito and his conductor Joseph Swensen opt for the tauter Prague version of the piece, which they shorten considerably by cutting great swathes through the recitatives. Swensen careers through it with a bullish energy, and much of the singing is at unsubtle, full throttle.
The best performances come from Claire Rutter - deranged, intense and vocally accurate as Anna - and the Canadian bass Nathan Berg as Leporello. Berg is marginally more charismatic than his Don, Garry Magee, whose sexiness doesn't radiate here as it has elsewhere. Paul Nilon is an unusually tough Ottavio, and Phillip Ens a very scary Commendatore. When it was over, pandemonium broke out, as the audience bayed for Bieito's blood.
· Until July 6. Box office: 020-7632 8300.
