Three elements combine to make this new production of Don Giovanni a work of genius: the crackling wit of the translation, the brilliant set, and a searching, imaginative, revisionary directorial take. Jeremy Sams’s translation is hip and very funny, with no linguistic punches pulled. His version of Leporello’s account of the Don’s many conquests is especially inspired. Ian McNeil’s design is equally inspired. This is Rufus Norris’s debut as an opera director, and he bursts on this scene like an atom bomb: it is an amazing arrival, with a freshness and incisiveness that promises an entirely new repertoire of operatic experiences to come.
      Norris’s directorial take is revisionary because the Don has always been – and most emphatically was for librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte and Mozart himself – an Enlightenment hero, defying conventional morality and piety and asserting the claims of the individual through a large appetite for life. Don Giovanni is a prototype of Nietzschean man, through whom the greatest force of nature flows, and by which he is driven cheerfully and lustfully on. When called to account, he refuses to collapse into the bathos and conventionality of last-minute repentance, defiant to the last.
      Such is the Don of Da Ponte and Mozart. But Rufus Norris gives us a different Don: a bad man, selfish, louche, destructive, cruel. It is interesting that the music itself does not allow rewritings of most of the others: only with Donna Elvira and with Leporello, one of the great figures of art, can something fresh be brought out, and Norris finds it: in Leporello’s case it is the fact that he loves the Don after all, so that despite the mistreatment he receives and all his threats to leave, at the end he is heartbroken at the Don’s fate. This is implicit in the original, but Norris brings it fully out, and places it alongside another touch of true pathos he finds – and which really does illustrate the piercingly fresh eye he brings. Instead of having the Don sing a serenade beneath a serving-girl’s window to the plucked lilt of a mandolin, Norris has him sing a soliloquy implying that his restless hunt for sex is the result of having lost a great love, making his philandering an unappeasable hunger for an unrecoverable past. It is a striking moment, and for that moment redeems the otherwise increasingly unsympathetic Don that Norris designs for us.
      Iain Paterson is a convincingly and entertainingly disreputable Don, and Brindley Sherratt a superb Leporello. What a role Leporello is: and how well Sherratt fills it.
      The other character Norris interestingly reconfigures is Donna Elvira. In his account of her she is more a stalker and dupe than a majestic incarnation of grief, abandonment and unquenchable love. The role was sung and acted wonderfully by a last-minute replacement, Sarah Redgwick, standing in for the unwell Rebecca Evans. Indeed Redgwick took the role by the throat as if she had been rehearsing it for years: she was an affecting Elvira, and brought wit as well as bathos to the part.
      For the rest, Don Ottavio has always to remain the ineffectual lovelorn swain, and Donna Anna fiercely committed to grief and revenge, keeping Ottavio dangling. Katherine Broderick as Donna Anna and Robert Murray as Don Ottavio were born for the roles, each with eloquent voices.
      Sarah Tynan’s Zerlina was a sexy delight, and played the contradictions of the role zestfully; John Molloy’s Masetto was the below-stairs twin of Ottavio, weakly threatening and getting doubly trounced for his pains. The cast wove their way in and out among the cleverly choreographed evolutions of the set, achieving a pace and a degree of mounting tension which was the complete opposite of the static and formulaic operatic tradition of yore. Amazing stuff: and unmissable. In time to come people will be pleased to say that they saw the first night of this brilliant Don Giovanni, for it marks a step up in the continuing life of opera in our culture.
AC Grayling