The Marriage of Figaro (Le nozze di Figaro)

Synopsis

Widely regarded as the greatest comic opera ever written, Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro whisks us through the whirlwind events of ‘one crazy day’ (to borrow Beaumarchais’s title for his original play) as Figaro, the Count’s valet, attempts to wed his beloved Susanna, the Countess’s maid, before their philandering master can bed her first.

Following her much-praised ENO productions of Vaughan Williams’s Riders to the Sea and Henze’s Elegy for Young Lovers, leading stage and screen actress Fiona Shaw plots a path through The Marriage of Figaro’s moral maze of disguises, deceptions, sexual intrigue, mutual suspicion and mistaken identity.

Former ENO Music Director Paul Daniel returns to conduct an impressive young cast led by Iain Paterson, recently admired at ENO in such diverse roles as Verdi’s Amonasro, Gounod’s Mephistopheles, Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Wagner’s Amfortas, as Figaro and Kate Valentine as the predatory Count’s long-suffering but all-forgiving wife.

Our Review:

5 October 2011

It’s often vaunted as Mozart’s most revolutionary opera, making bold swipes at the dastardliness of the class structure in 18th century Europe, but these days The Marriage of Figaro comes across like a simple upstairs-downstairs farce.

Fiona Shaw’s new production for ENO (her third go at directing opera) is a bit of a curate’s egg. There is plenty of invention and humour, as well as detailed performances all round, but Shaw seems to constantly prod the audience by cramming in supposedly poignant objects and projecting decorative bits and bobs onto the space above the action, presumably to remind us that she’s really ‘doing something’. There may be a wealth of meaning in all these intrusions, but it detracts and distracts from the clarity of the drama.

Paper-thin walls make up the constantly revolving set, underlining a lack of privacy and embodying the dizzying nature of the plot, while also ensuring perpetual moti...

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