EIF: The Marriage of Figaro @ Festival Theatre
Mozart's all-time classic The Marriage of Figaro is brought bang up-to-date in a modern retelling by Komische Oper Berlin which pulls no punches
What did you expect? This writer may be an opera dunce, but Mozart was a people-pleaser – Figaro is hard to resist. Although it is actually Susanna (a fantastically cold-blooded Penny Sofroniadou on press night) around whom the plot pivots, but The Marriage of Susanna sounds less all-time classic, more Edwardian romcom. Komische Oper Berlin, with director Kirill Serebrennikov, have updated the classic tropes of wily servants, foolish masters and everyone dressing as everyone else, with the eat-the-rich mentality of Saltburn… and its nakedness too. Is it obscene? Is it offensive? These are the wrong questions. Can I stop watching?
Count Almaviva (Hubert Zapiór) is so cold, he delegates all actions – except sexual harassment – to his henchman. His lonely wife (Verity Wingate) becomes a pawn/accomplice in Susanna and Figaro’s pranks. There’s a subplot involving a mute, nude, lewd Cherubino (Georgy Kudrenko) and long-suffering interpreter Cherubina (Patricia Nolz), but the one which really captured me was Susanne Bredehöft as The Old Woman (always a great character name, wouldn’t you agree?). At one point, the Countess’s lovelorn lament to a mirror is made ironic by her elderly servant doing the same thing downstairs, silently studying her reflection. Where’s her lover? Where's her riches? Must she spend the rest of her days preventing washing machines bouncing across the floor?
This show is not a visual feast but a visual buffet, so much to see even for opera dunces. The double-decker stage (swanky apartment above grubby basement) abounds with Olaf Freese's exciting lighting effects, contrasting concurrent scenes and drawing eyes to moments of beauty – such as Tatyana Dolmatovskaya’s costume designs (with Serebrennikov), which in the Countess’s dress collection reaches new heights of sumptuousness; I particularly loved the trains so long they could be hidden beneath. The stakes couldn’t be higher.
The Marriage of Figaro, Festival Theatre, part of Edinburgh International Festival, run ended