Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff
The early perception of Mozart's opera was that it was trivial; Benjamin Davis's new production for Welsh National Opera seems designed to prove it so. Transposed from 18th-century Naples to a 1950s British seaside promenade, the references move through Donald McGill to Gavin & Stacey and Little Britain. But the result is a series of cliches, rather than the witty surrealist sleight of hand one might have expected Davis to have learned from WNO directors such as Richard Jones, his long-term staff producer.
The programme essay reflects on the work's link with the end of the Enlightenment, but the staging itself opts for tawdry illuminations in a poor man's Blackpool. Philosopher Don Alfonso becomes an end-of-the-pier entertainer, looking like a spiv with spats, a misogynist as crude as he is cynical. His assertion that fidelity in women is as rare as the Arabian phoenix is the cue for the wager with his friends Guglielmo and Ferrando that their fiancees will turn out to be fickle. It also cues the appearance of a Vivienne Westwood-like figure in tapshoes and tutu, whose billboard styling is An Arabian Phoenix.
Such a literal approach promised little insight into the psychological dilemmas thrown up by the men's wager, and so it proved. Lorenzo da Ponte's libretto is hardly a model of logic or political correctness; it is Mozart who engages with the lovers' emotional and moral turmoil, yet nothing here appeared to stem from the music.
The action centres around Botticelli's ice-cream parlour – Venus with a giant cone as logo – above which Fiordiligi and Dorabella rent rooms. A Sybil Fawlty proprietress, plus a Manuel-style waiter, are confusing add-ons. Odder still are the stock Punch and Judy elements – policeman, string of sausages, crocodile – populating the promenade. Yet another distraction is that the maid Despina, Alfonso's counterpart and stooge, is given a baby who gets tossed around more than Judy's. If there is a point about all relationships being essentially dysfunctional, it does not emerge.
True Mozartean finesse was also absent from the singing. Neal Davies's Alfonso and Claire Ormshaw's Despina were subdued, and none of the lovers (Camilla Roberts, Helen Lepalaan, Robin Tritschler and Gary Griffiths) could shake off intonation problems. Tritschler's Ferrando was generally the most secure, despite at one point losing his false nose.
Conductor Daniele Rustioni shone, his orchestral colouring often subtly shaded. But, with a directorial concept beyond redemption, his was a pretty thankless task.