Three years ago, John Berry, ENO’s Artistic Director, invited acclaimed theatre director Rufus Norris to reinvent Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Unfortunately, it was not much of a success, and was panned by critics. This year, the production has returned to ENO, with some changes, albeit none that are particularly remarkable. ENO’s publicity machine has, this time round, gone on an advertising offensive.
Fact is, they say, stranger than fiction. Damon Albarn’s latest foray onto the operatic stage certainly makes strange the true-life story of Elizabethan intellectual and philosopher John Dee.
Mozart's Don Giovanni is an opera that is most difficult to classify. On the one hand, it has many of the trappings of a traditional opera buffa: a fast-paced farce with people falling in and out of bed, master and servant switching clothes, a buffoon-like manservant sung in the bass register and so on.
