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His second notion is to ridicule the idea that we would not recognise our nearest and dearest in disguise. At one point, a spotlight searches the audience as if to insinuate, ‘This could be you’. ‘How honest are human emotions?’ he seems to ask. When Mozart’s two couples emerge from the auditorium dressed as members of the audience we suspect Gloger wants us to believe we are watching ourselves on the stage, and see our own deceptions unfold. The director prompts the question, what would happen if this Così fan tutte were to take place after a performance of Così? It’s an idea that turns the whole artifice of theatre performance on its head: perceptions are inverted, and the audience invited to reconsider the reality of its experience. So far so good, and not beyond our wit to understand the universality of love and all its complications.īogdan Volkov, Serena Gamberoni, Gordon Bintner (c) ROH / Tristram Kentonīut, before the opening scene Gloger introduces the first of his concepts by starting the production not at the beginning but at the end with all six principals in period costumes taking curtain calls in front of the stage during the overture. Each of Ben Baur’s sets suggest film or theatre stages and each is given location-specific costumes by Karin Jud. Thereafter, we encounter the Garden of Eden (with a serpent winding itself round a solitary tree to conjure a loss of innocence), a woodland glade (Arcadia) and a below stage dressing room. From Mozart’s own time, an elegant façade lifts away to reveal a railway station platform (associations with Brief Encounter?), closely followed by a glitzy 1960s cocktail bar.
#MASQUERADE ARDOUR SERIES#
This staging is conceived as a series of time-travelling tableaux. It’s one thing to explore a fresh approach to the mischief-making within Mozart’s opera and to re-examine the nature of its relationships, but to burden this with an inquiry into the meaning of meta-theatre is something else altogether. First unveiled in 2016, this second revival of Jan Philipp Gloger’s Così fan tutte remains self-consciously preoccupied with the question, ‘What is theatre?’ While his interview in the souvenir programme with the dramaturg Katharina John is intellectually rigorous, this over-thought academic approach spills over onto a staging that is so concept-driven it ultimately obfuscates a comedy of manners, supplanting what could have been an hilarious evening for an exercise in theoretical ideas.