The Teatro San Carlo in Naples opened its new season with Vasily Barkhatov's new production of Turandot. The Russian director's staging at first appeared shocking, so much so that at the premiere it provoked protests. Barkhatov has got rid of the original Chinese setting and, as for the scenography, he draws inspiration from the Abbey of San Galgano, as it appears in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia. However, is only a container for a myriad of visual ideas with which he stuff his setting, overshadowing the music and drama therein.
The director’s core idea is that the original Turandot story is but a reverie: in the prologue, a movie shows Calaf and Turandot travelling in a car as they return from Timur’s funeral. After she refuses to marry him, they have an accident and, while Calaf is on the operating table, they “dream” a tale, that is the story Puccini put into music.
This gives Barkhatov the pretext to roam freely in the forest of his cultural fetishes. With the aid of Zinovy Margolin's sets, the stage is jam-packed with characters straight out of a dark, postmodern fantasy novel, with Galya Solodovnikova's eerie costumes and all the props one can imagine. There is no anchorage to any particular cultural milieu, historical age or geographic place: anything goes, from Dante’s Commedia to the gothic novel, from the Scots guards carrying the Emperor in a glass case to neon signs signalling the solutions to the riddles. Moreover, to remind us that it is but an hallucination, every now and then a smashed-up car and an operating room are lowered and raised on the stage. In short, there are a whole load of multifaceted cultural backgrounds (graphic novels, movies, video games) which a director of the Generation X grew up on, something more traditional opera-goers have further and further to come to terms with.