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Coliseum, LondonEmma Rice’s imaginative reworking features lovely singing, pleasing comedy, striking stage designs – and a misjudged moment of sadness
‘Heaven is overrated. Hell is where the party’s at.” That’s the publicity line for Emma Rice’s new production of Orpheus in the Underworld at English National Opera. It’s only partly true, unless your idea of a party is the sort of thing that gets your picture on the wall at the CID. On the face of it, this show is the light relief in ENO’s four-opera Orpheus season. Offenbach’s operetta satirised Gluck’s opera (which opened here earlier in the week), with its lofty classical story of true lovers. What if, instead, Orpheus and Eurydice were that sitcom staple, the married couple grown sick of each other?
It’s not 1858 any more, thank God, and Rice might be right to find that Offenbach’s original version – the “happy ending” of which has awful Eurydice passed from god to god like a hand-me-down, while her equally objectionable husband gets off scot-free – unworkable as a modern comedy. But her solutions introduce jarring notes of tragedy that weigh the whole thing down. Continue reading...